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A Miscellany of Men
By
G. K. Chesterton
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A MISCELLANY OF MEN
By G. K. Chesterton
Contents
THE SUFFRAGIST
THE POET AND THE CHEESE
THE THING
THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS
THE NAMELESS MAN
THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA
THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES
THE MAD OFFICIAL
THE ENCHANTED MAN
THE SUN WORSHIPPER
THE WRONG INCENDIARY
THE FREE MAN
THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER
THE PRIEST OF SPRING
THE REAL JOURNALIST
THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT
THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY
THE FOOL
THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS
THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS
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THE MYSTAGOGUE
THE RED REACTIONARY
THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS
THE MUMMER
THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY
THE NEW THEOLOGIAN
THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN
THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER
THE SULTAN
THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS
THE MAN ON TOP
THE OTHER KIND OF MAN
THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN
THE DIVINE DETECTIVE
THE ELF OF JAPAN
THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE
THE CONTENTED MAN
THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL
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THE SUFFRAGIST
Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that a man both liberal and chivalric,
can and very often does feel a dis-ease and distrust touching
those political women we call Suffragettes. Like most other popular
sentiments, it is generally wrongly stated even when it is rightly felt.
One part of it can be put most shortly thus: that when a woman puts up
her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which
he is not afraid of her. He can be afraid of her speech and still more
of her silence; but force reminds him of a rusted but very real weapon
of which he has grown ashamed. But these crude summaries are never quite
accurate in any matter of the instincts. For the things which are the
simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest
when once they are disputed: which was what Joubert meant, I suppose,
when he said, "It is not hard to believe in God if one does not define
Him." When the evil instincts of old Foulon made him say of the poor,
"Let them eat grass," the good and Christian instincts of the poor
made them hang him on a lamppost with his mouth stuffed full of that
vegetation. But if a modern vegetarian aristocrat were to say to the
poor, "But why don't you like grass?" their intelligences would be much
more taxed to find such an appropriate repartee. And this matter of the
functions of the sexes is primarily a matter of the instincts; sex and
breathing are about the only two things that generally work best
when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same
sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also
polluting it with Breathing Exercises. We plunge at once into a forest
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of false analogies and bad blundering history; while almost any man or
woman left to themselves would know at least that sex is quite different
from anything else in the world.
There is no kind of comparison possible between a quarrel of man and
woman (however right the woman may be) and the other quarrels of slave
and master, of rich and poor, or of patriot and invader, with which the
Suffragists deluge us every day. The difference is as plain as noon;
these other alien groups never came into contact until they came into
collision. Races and ranks began with battle, even if they afterwards
melted into amity. But the very first fact about the sexes is that they
like each other. They seek each other: and awful as are the sins and
sorrows that often come of their mating, it was not such things that
made them meet. It is utterly astounding to note the way in which modern
writers and talkers miss this plain, wide, and overwhelming fact: one
would suppose woman a victim and nothing else. By this account ideal,
emancipated woman has, age after age, been knocked silly with a stone
axe. But really there is no fact to show that ideal, emancipated woman
was ever knocked silly; except the fact that she is silly. And that
might have arisen in so many other ways. Real responsible woman has
never been silly; and any one wishing to knock her would be wise (like
the streetboys) to knock and run away. It is ultimately idiotic to
compare this prehistoric participation with any royalties or rebellions.
Genuine royalties wish to crush rebellions. Genuine rebels wish to
destroy kings. The sexes cannot wish to abolish each other; and if we
allow them any sort of permanent opposition it will sink into something
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as base as a party system.
As marriage, therefore, is rooted in an aboriginal unity of instincts,
you cannot compare it, even in its quarrels, with any of the mere
collisions of separate institutions. You could compare it with the
emancipation of negroes from planters—if it were true that a white
man in early youth always dreamed of the abstract beauty of a black
man. You could compare it with the revolt of tenants against a
landlord—if it were true that young landlords wrote sonnets to
invisible tenants. You could compare it to the fighting policy of the
Fenians—if it were true that every normal Irishman wanted an
Englishman to come and live with him. But as we know there are no
instincts in any of these directions, these analogies are not only
false but false on the cardinal fact. I do not speak of the comparative
comfort or merit of these different things: I say they are different. It
may be that love turned to hate is terribly common in sexual matters: it
may be that hate turned to love is not uncommon in the rivalries of race
or class. But any philosophy about the sexes that begins with anything
but the mutual attraction of the sexes, begins with a fallacy; and all
its historical comparisons are as irrelevant and impertinent as puns.
But to expose such cold negation of the instincts is easy: to express
or even half express the instincts is very hard. The instincts are very
much concerned with what literary people call "style" in letters or more
vulgar people call "style" in dress. They are much concerned with how
a thing is done, as well as whether one may do it: and the deepest
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elements in their attraction or aversion can often only be conveyed
by stray examples or sudden images. When Danton was defending himself
before the Jacobin tribunal he spoke so loud that his voice was heard
across the Seine, in quite remote streets on the other side of the
river. He must have bellowed like a bull of Bashan. Yet none of us would
think of that prodigy except as something poetical and appropriate. None
of us would instinctively feel that Danton was less of a man or even
less of a gentleman, for speaking so in such an hour. But suppose we
heard that Marie Antoinette, when tried before the same tribunal,
had howled so that she could be heard in the Faubourg St.
Germain—well, I leave it to the instincts, if there are any left.
It is not wrong to howl. Neither is it right. It is simply a question
of the instant impression on the artistic and even animal parts of
humanity, if the noise were heard suddenly like a gun.
Perhaps the nearest verbal analysis of the instinct may be found in
the gestures of the orator addressing a crowd. For the true orator must
always be a demagogue: even if the mob be a small mob, like the French
committee or the English House of Lords. And "demagogue," in the good
Greek meaning, does not mean one who pleases the populace, but one who
leads it: and if you will notice, you will see that all the instinctive
gestures of oratory are gestures of military leadership; pointing the
people to a path or waving them on to an advance. Notice that long
sweep of the arm across the body and outward, which great orators use
naturally and cheap orators artificially. It is almost the exact gesture
of the drawing of a sword.
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The point is not that women are unworthy of votes; it is not even that
votes are unworthy of women. It is that votes are unworthy of men, so
long as they are merely votes; and have nothing in them of this ancient
militarism of democracy. The only crowd worth talking to is the crowd
that is ready to go somewhere and do something; the only demagogue worth
hearing is he who can point at something to be done: and, if he points
with a sword, will only feel it familiar and useful like an elongated
finger. Now, except in some mystical exceptions which prove the rule,
these are not the gestures, and therefore not the instincts, of women.
No honest man dislikes the public woman. He can only dislike the
political woman; an entirely different thing. The instinct has nothing
to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a
desire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown
and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles
from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical
motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that
she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands;
leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth
open a little longer and wider than is dignified—well, I only
write here of the facts of natural history; and the fact is that it is
this, and not publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modern
world to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and
whether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a
warning of nature.
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THE POET AND THE CHEESE
There is something creepy in the flat Eastern Counties; a brush of the
white feather. There is a stillness, which is rather of the mind than of
the bodily senses. Rapid changes and sudden revelations of scenery, even
when they are soundless, have something in them analogous to a movement
of music, to a crash or a cry. Mountain hamlets spring out on us with
a shout like mountain brigands. Comfortable valleys accept us with open
arms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in the
great level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even
when there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place.
One's voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and something
unreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, "And he went a
little farther and came to another place," comes back into the mind.
In some such mood I came along a lean, pale road south of the fens, and
found myself in a large, quiet, and seemingly forgotten village. It was
one of those places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it may
be, one afterwards decks out with unreal details. I dare say that grass
did not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curious
impression that it did. I dare say the marketplace was not literally
lonely and without sign of life, but it left the vague impression of
being so. The place was large and even loose in design, yet it had the
air of something hidden away and always overlooked. It seemed shy, like
a big yokel; the low roofs seemed to be ducking behind the hedges and
railings; and the chimneys holding their breath. I came into it in that
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dead hour of the afternoon which is neither after lunch nor before tea,
nor anything else even on a half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feeling
that I had strayed into a lost and extra hour that is not numbered in
the twenty-four.
I entered an inn which stood openly in the market-place yet was almost
as private as a private house. Those who talk of "public-houses" as if
they were all one problem would have been both puzzled and pleased with
such a place. In the front window a stout old lady in black with an
elaborate cap sat doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind of
comfortable Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was)
the original Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour sat
a tall, strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty and
a pair of scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework.
Two feet behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like
wood painted scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not
touched, and probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug there
was an equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'Household
Words'.
I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had
met somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety;
and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at
once solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in
some of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness
and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way commonplace. This was
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curious; for Wordsworth's men were of the rocks and fells, and not of
the fenlands or flats. But perhaps it is the clearness of still water
and the mirrored skies of meres and pools that produces this crystalline
virtue. Perhaps that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead
of a mountain poet. Perhaps it is the water that does it. Certainly the
whole of that town was like a cup of water given at morning.
After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner of
rustic courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town. The
old lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continued
her needlework. But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing at
her with a suddenly arrested concern. "I suppose," I said, "that it has
nothing to do with the cheese of that name." "Oh, yes," she answered,
with a staggering indifference, "they used to make it here."
I put down my mug with a gravity far greater than her own. "But this
place is a Shrine!" I said. "Pilgrims should be pouring into it from
wherever the English legend has endured alive. There ought to be a
colossal statue in the market-place of the man who invented Stilton
cheese. There ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow who
provided the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet let
into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton
cheese, and survived. On the top of a neighbouring hill (if there
are any neighbouring hills) there should be a huge model of a Stilton
cheese, made of some rich green marble and engraven with some haughty
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motto: I suggest something like 'Ver non semper viret; sed Stiltonia
semper virescit.'" The old lady said, "Yes, sir," and continued her
domestic occupations.
After a strained and emotional silence, I said, "If I take a meal here
tonight can you give me any Stilton?"
"No, sir; I'm afraid we haven't got any Stilton," said the immovable
one, speaking as if it were something thousands of miles away.
"This is awful," I said: for it seemed to me a strange allegory of
England as she is now; this little town that had lost its glory; and
forgotten, so to speak, the meaning of its own name. And I thought it
yet more symbolic because from all that old and full and virile life,
the great cheese was gone; and only the beer remained. And even that
will be stolen by the Liberals or adulterated by the Conservatives.
Politely disengaging myself, I made my way as quickly as possible to
the nearest large, noisy, and nasty town in that neighbourhood, where I
sought out the nearest vulgar, tawdry, and avaricious restaurant.
There (after trifling with beef, mutton, puddings, pies, and so on) I
got a Stilton cheese. I was so much moved by my memories that I wrote
a sonnet to the cheese. Some critical friends have hinted to me that my
sonnet is not strictly new; that it contains "echoes" (as they express
it) of some other poem that they have read somewhere. Here, at least,
are the lines I wrote:
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SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE
Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I—
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading 'Household Words',
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.
I confess I feel myself as if some literary influence, something that
has haunted me, were present in this otherwise original poem; but it is
hopeless to disentangle it now.
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THE THING
The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like
the war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken
free. For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing
itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.
Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from
its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations
tend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this
we hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the
spirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded
that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are
not knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to
find people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to
be clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the
sun and moon.
The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government
arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the
ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.
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The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes
of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be
consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked
a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows
are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives.
They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of
the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the
valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the
men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or
splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather
under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in
case the word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral
atmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always have
quite as much influence as the men. But in modern England neither the
men nor the women have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the
moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people
are utterly impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic
processes going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.
Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place
which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for
good or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever
it is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the
villas advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates
into which England has long been divided are passing out of the hands
of the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and
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often actually foreigners.
Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was
really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate
whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a
gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps
they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that
the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof
over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say
in, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange
trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over
and treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villa
is as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all
Lancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium
were flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a
moneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a
thing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.
Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes
round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It
is believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of
self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions
about everything except what he understands. The examination paper of
the Election generally consists of some such queries as these: "I. Are
the green biscuits eaten by the peasants of Eastern Lithuania in your
opinion fit for human food? II. Are the religious professions of the
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President of the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you
think that the savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy
and hygienic as the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland?
IV. Did the lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry III
reserve the right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of
what America thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst
thinks of the state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the
two persons in frock-coats placed before you at this election."
Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government that
the ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions
like these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and
Queries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether
farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether
stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But
these are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to
touch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and
divine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he
knows nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere:
the Thing is throttled.
The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through;
in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances
of martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of
Napoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone
forth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning
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only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of
the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would
have happened if the Thing had really been abroad.
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THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS
The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed,
if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes
nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific
or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution
and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But
especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the
writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For
the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.
Thinking backwards is not quite easy to define abstractedly; and,
perhaps, the simplest method is to take some object, as plain as
possible, and from it illustrate the two modes of thought: the right
mode in which all real results have been rooted; the wrong mode, which
is confusing all our current discussions, especially our discussions
about the relations of the sexes. Casting my eye round the room, I
notice an object which is often mentioned in the higher and subtler of
these debates about the sexes: I mean a poker. I will take a poker and
think about it; first forwards and then backwards; and so, perhaps, show
what I mean.
The sage desiring to think well and wisely about a poker will begin
somewhat as follows: Among the live creatures that crawl about this star
the queerest is the thing called Man. This plucked and plumeless bird,
comic and forlorn, is the butt of all the philosophies. He is the only
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naked animal; and this quality, once, it is said, his glory, is now his
shame. He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants. He
might almost be considered as an absent-minded person who had gone
bathing and left his clothes everywhere, so that he has hung his hat
upon the beaver and his coat upon the sheep. The rabbit has white warmth
for a waistcoat, and the glow-worm has a lantern for a head. But man has
no heat in his hide, and the light in his body is darkness; and he must
look for light and warmth in the wild, cold universe in which he is
cast. This is equally true of his soul and of his body; he is the one
creature that has lost his heart as much as he has lost his hide. In a
spiritual sense he has taken leave of his senses; and even in a literal
sense he has been unable to keep his hair on. And just as this external
need of his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion,
so it has lit in his hand the only adequate symbol of it: I mean the red
flower called Fire. Fire, the most magic and startling of all material
things, is a thing known only to man and the expression of his sublime
externalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that
is divine on his altars. It is the most human thing in the world; seen
across wastes of marsh or medleys of forest, it is veritably the purple
and golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous and
rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its
presence is life; its touch is death. Therefore, it is always necessary
to have an intermediary between ourselves and this dreadful deity; to
have a priest to intercede for us with the god of life and death; to
send an ambassador to the fire. That priest is the poker. Made of
a material more merciless and warlike than the other instruments of
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domesticity, hammered on the anvil and born itself in the flame, the
poker is strong enough to enter the burning fiery furnace, and, like
the holy children, not be consumed. In this heroic service it is often
battered and twisted, but is the more honourable for it, like any other
soldier who has been under fire.
Now all this may sound very fanciful and mystical, but it is the right
view of pokers, and no one who takes it will ever go in for any wrong
view of pokers, such as using them to beat one's wife or torture one's
children, or even (though that is more excusable) to make a policeman
jump, as the clown does in the pantomime. He who has thus gone back to
the beginning, and seen everything as quaint and new, will always see
things in their right order, the one depending on the other in degree of
purpose and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man
and the man for the glory of God.
This is thinking forwards. Now our modern discussions about everything,
Imperialism, Socialism, or Votes for Women, are all entangled in
an opposite train of thought, which runs as follows:—A modern
intellectual comes in and sees a poker. He is a positivist; he will not
begin with any dogmas about the nature of man, or any day-dreams about
the mystery of fire. He will begin with what he can see, the poker; and
the first thing he sees about the poker is that it is crooked. He says,
"Poor poker; it's crooked." Then he asks how it came to be crooked; and
is told that there is a thing in the world (with which his temperament
has hitherto left him unacquainted)—a thing called fire. He points
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out, very kindly and clearly, how silly it is of people, if they want
a straight poker, to put it into a chemical combustion which will very
probably heat and warp it. "Let us abolish fire," he says, "and then
we shall have perfectly straight pokers. Why should you want a fire
at all?" They explain to him that a creature called Man wants a fire,
because he has no fur or feathers. He gazes dreamily at the embers for
a few seconds, and then shakes his head. "I doubt if such an animal is
worth preserving," he says. "He must eventually go under in the cosmic
struggle when pitted against well-armoured and warmly protected species,
who have wings and trunks and spires and scales and horns and shaggy
hair. If Man cannot live without these luxuries, you had better abolish
Man." At this point, as a rule, the crowd is convinced; it heaves up all
its clubs and axes, and abolishes him. At least, one of him.
Before we begin discussing our various new plans for the people's
welfare, let us make a kind of agreement that we will argue in a
straightforward way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modern
movements may be right; but let them be defended because they are right,
not because they are typical modern movements. Let us begin with the
actual woman or man in the street, who is cold; like mankind before the
finding of fire. Do not let us begin with the end of the last red-hot
discussion—like the end of a red hot poker. Imperialism may be
right. But if it is right, it is right because England has some divine
authority like Israel, or some human authority like Rome; not because we
have saddled ourselves with South Africa, and don't know how to get rid
of it. Socialism may be true. But if it is true, it is true because the
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tribe or the city can really declare all land to be common land, not
because Harrod's Stores exist and the commonwealth must copy them.
Female suffrage may be just. But if it is just, it is just because women
are women, not because women are sweated workers and white slaves and
all sorts of things that they ought never to have been. Let not the
Imperialist accept a colony because it is there, nor the Suffragist
seize a vote because it is lying about, nor the Socialist buy up an
industry merely because it is for sale.
Let us ask ourselves first what we really do want, not what recent legal
decisions have told us to want, or recent logical philosophies proved
that we must want, or recent social prophecies predicted that we shall
some day want. If there must be a British Empire, let it be British, and
not, in mere panic, American or Prussian. If there ought to be female
suffrage, let it be female, and not a mere imitation as coarse as
the male blackguard or as dull as the male clerk. If there is to be
Socialism, let it be social; that is, as different as possible from all
the big commercial departments of to-day. The really good journeyman
tailor does not cut his coat according to his cloth; he asks for more
cloth. The really practical statesman does not fit himself to existing
conditions, he denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some
deeply planted tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at
last into tiny twigs; and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us is
trying to bend the tree by a twig: to alter England through a distant
colony, or to capture the State through a small State department, or to
destroy all voting through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise
24
who resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy
(in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers the roots of things.
25
THE NAMELESS MAN
There are only two forms of government the monarchy or personal
government, and the republic or impersonal government. England is not a
government; England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings.
But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the
method of abstract democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal
government politics are so much more personal. In France and America,
where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full
of human details—some might even say of inhuman details. But in
England, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personages
do not permit personalities. In England names are honoured, and
therefore names are suppressed. But in the republics, in France
especially, a man can put his enemies' names into his article and his
own name at the end of it.
This is the essential condition of such candour. If we merely made our
anonymous articles more violent, we should be baser than we are now. We
should only be arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels. And I,
for one, have always believed in the more general signing of articles,
and have signed my own articles on many occasions when, heaven knows,
I had little reason to be vain of them. I have heard many arguments for
anonymity; but they all seem to amount to the statement that anonymity
is safe, which is just what I complain of. In matters of truth the fact
that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a
proof that you ought to publish it.
26
But there is one answer to my perpetual plea for a man putting his name
to his writing. There is one answer, and there is only one answer, and
it is never given. It is that in the modern complexity very often a
man's name is almost as false as his pseudonym. The prominent person
today is eternally trying to lose a name, and to get a title. For
instance, we all read with earnestness and patience the pages of the
'Daily Mail', and there are times when we feel moved to cry, "Bring to
us the man who thought these strange thoughts! Pursue him, capture
him, take great care of him. Bring him back to us tenderly, like some
precious bale of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man who
desires such things to be printed. Let us know his name; his social
and medical pedigree." But in the modern muddle (it might be said)
how little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were indeed
subscribed by the man who had inspired them. Suppose that after every
article stating that the Premier is a piratical Socialist there were
printed the simple word "Northcliffe." What does that simple word
suggest to the simple soul? To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise)
it suggests a lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towards
the Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag the
fortress of some forgotten chieftain. As it happens, of course, I
know that the word does not mean this; it means another Fleet Street
journalist like myself or only different from myself in so far as he has
sought to secure money while I have sought to secure a jolly time.
A title does not now even serve as a distinction: it does not
27
distinguish. A coronet is not merely an extinguisher: it is a
hiding-place.
But the really odd thing is this. This false quality in titles does not
merely apply to the new and vulgar titles, but to the old and historic
titles also. For hundreds of years titles in England have been
essentially unmeaning; void of that very weak and very human instinct in
which titles originated. In essential nonsense of application there is
nothing to choose between Northcliffe and Norfolk. The Duke of Norfolk
means (as my exquisite and laborious knowledge of Latin informs me) the
Leader of Norfolk. It is idle to talk against representative government
or for it. All government is representative government until it begins
to decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins to
decay the instant it begins to govern. All aristocrats were first meant
as envoys of democracy; and most envoys of democracy lose no time in
becoming aristocrats. By the old essential human notion, the Duke of
Norfolk ought simply to be the first or most manifest of Norfolk men.
I see growing and filling out before me the image of an actual Duke of
Norfolk. For instance, Norfolk men all make their voices run up very
high at the end of a sentence. The Duke of Norfolk's voice, therefore,
ought to end in a perfect shriek. They often (I am told) end sentences
with the word "together"; entirely irrespective of its meaning. Thus
I shall expect the Duke of Norfolk to say: "I beg to second the motion
together"; or "This is a great constitutional question together." I
shall expect him to know much about the Broads and the sluggish rivers
28
above them; to know about the shooting of water-fowl, and not to
know too much about anything else. Of mountains he must be wildly and
ludicrously ignorant. He must have the freshness of Norfolk; nay, even
the flatness of Norfolk. He must remind me of the watery expanses, the
great square church towers and the long level sunsets of East England.
If he does not do this, I decline to know him.
I need not multiply such cases; the principle applies everywhere. Thus I
lose all interest in the Duke of Devonshire unless he can assure me that
his soul is filled with that strange warm Puritanism, Puritanism shot
with romance, which colours the West Country. He must eat nothing but
clotted cream, drink nothing but cider, reading nothing but 'Lorna
Doone', and be unacquainted with any town larger than Plymouth, which he
must regard with some awe, as the Central Babylon of the world. Again, I
should expect the Prince of Wales always to be full of the mysticism and
dreamy ardour of the Celtic fringe.
Perhaps it may be thought that these demands are a little extreme; and
that our fancy is running away with us. Nevertheless, it is not my Duke
of Devonshire who is funny; but the real Duke of Devonshire. The point
is that the scheme of titles is a misfit throughout: hardly anywhere do
we find a modern man whose name and rank represent in any way his type,
his locality, or his mode of life. As a mere matter of social comedy,
the thing is worth noticing. You will meet a man whose name suggests a
gouty admiral, and you will find him exactly like a timid organist:
you will hear announced the name of a haughty and almost heathen grande
29
dame, and behold the entrance of a nice, smiling Christian cook. These
are light complications of the central fact of the falsification of all
names and ranks. Our peers are like a party of mediaeval knights who
should have exchanged shields, crests, and pennons. For the present rule
seems to be that the Duke of Sussex may lawfully own the whole of Essex;
and that the Marquis of Cornwall may own all the hills and valleys so
long as they are not Cornish.
The clue to all this tangle is as simple as it is terrible. If England
is an aristocracy, England is dying. If this system IS the country,
as some say, the country is stiffening into more than the pomp and
paralysis of China. It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that
it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon—and is very
particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and
to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease
called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean
coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is
the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem
straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. For the kings
of finance speechlessness is counted a way of being strong, though it
should rather be counted a way of being sly. By this time the Parliament
does not parley any more than the Speaker speaks. Even the newspaper
editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do
not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression "golden
silence." The expression "brazen silence" is the only adequate phrase
for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordless
30
nightmare, we must awake with a yell. The Revolution that releases
England from the fixed falsity of its present position will be not less
noisy than other revolutions. It will contain, I fear, a great deal of
that rude accomplishment described among little boys as "calling names";
but that will not matter much so long as they are the right names.
THE GARDENER AND THE GUINEA
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an English Peasant.
Indeed, the type can only exist in community, so much does it depend on
cooperation and common laws. One must not think primarily of a French
Peasant; any more than of a German Measle. The plural of the word is its
proper form; you cannot have a Peasant till you have a peasantry. The
essence of the Peasant ideal is equality; and you cannot be equal all by
yourself.
Nevertheless, because human nature always craves and half creates
the things necessary to its happiness, there are approximations and
suggestions of the possibility of such a race even here. The nearest
approach I know to the temper of a Peasant in England is that of the
country gardener; not, of course, the great scientific gardener attached
to the great houses; he is a rich man's servant like any other. I mean
the small jobbing gardener who works for two or three moderate-sized
31
gardens; who works on his own; who sometimes even owns his house; and
who frequently owns his tools. This kind of man has really some of the
characteristics of the true Peasant—especially the characteristics
that people don't like. He has none of that irresponsible mirth which
is the consolation of most poor men in England. The gardener is even
disliked sometimes by the owners of the shrubs and flowers; because
(like Micaiah) he prophesies not good concerning them, but evil. The
English gardener is grim, critical, self-respecting; sometimes even
economical. Nor is this (as the reader's lightning wit will flash back
at me) merely because the English gardener is always a Scotch gardener.
The type does exist in pure South England blood and speech; I have
spoken to the type. I was speaking to the type only the other evening,
when a rather odd little incident occurred.
It was one of those wonderful evenings in which the sky was warm and
radiant while the earth was still comparatively cold and wet. But it
is of the essence of Spring to be unexpected; as in that heroic and
hackneyed line about coming "before the swallow dares." Spring never is
Spring unless it comes too soon. And on a day like that one might pray,
without any profanity, that Spring might come on earth as it was in
heaven. The gardener was gardening. I was not gardening. It is needless
to explain the causes of this difference; it would be to tell the
tremendous history of two souls. It is needless because there is a more
immediate explanation of the case: the gardener and I, if not equal in
agreement, were at least equal in difference. It is quite certain that
he would not have allowed me to touch the garden if I had gone down
32
on my knees to him. And it is by no means certain that I should have
consented to touch the garden if he had gone down on his knees to me.
His activity and my idleness, therefore, went on steadily side by side
through the long sunset hours.
And all the time I was thinking what a shame it was that he was not
sticking his spade into his own garden, instead of mine: he knew about
the earth and the underworld of seeds, the resurrection of Spring and
the flowers that appear in order like a procession marshalled by a
herald. He possessed the garden intellectually and spiritually, while
I only possessed it politically. I know more about flowers than
coal-owners know about coal; for at least I pay them honour when they
are brought above the surface of the earth. I know more about gardens
than railway shareholders seem to know about railways: for at least I
know that it needs a man to make a garden; a man whose name is Adam. But
as I walked on that grass my ignorance overwhelmed me—and yet that
phrase is false, because it suggests something like a storm from the sky
above. It is truer to say that my ignorance exploded underneath me, like
a mine dug long before; and indeed it was dug before the beginning of
the ages. Green bombs of bulbs and seeds were bursting underneath me
everywhere; and, so far as my knowledge went, they had been laid by
a conspirator. I trod quite uneasily on this uprush of the earth; the
Spring is always only a fruitful earthquake. With the land all alive
under me I began to wonder more and more why this man, who had made the
garden, did not own the garden. If I stuck a spade into the ground, I
should be astonished at what I found there...and just as I thought this
33
I saw that the gardener was astonished too.
Just as I was wondering why the man who used the spade did not profit by
the spade, he brought me something he had found actually in my soil. It
was a thin worn gold piece of the Georges, of the sort which are called,
I believe, Spade Guineas. Anyhow, a piece of gold.
If you do not see the parable as I saw it just then, I doubt if I can
explain it just now. He could make a hundred other round yellow fruits:
and this flat yellow one is the only sort that I can make. How it came
there I have not a notion—unless Edmund Burke dropped it in his
hurry to get back to Butler's Court. But there it was: this is a cold
recital of facts. There may be a whole pirate's treasure lying under
the earth there, for all I know or care; for there is no interest in a
treasure without a Treasure Island to sail to. If there is a treasure it
will never be found, for I am not interested in wealth beyond the dreams
of avarice since I know that avarice has no dreams, but only insomnia.
And, for the other party, my gardener would never consent to dig up the
garden.
Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed with intellectual emotions when I saw
that answer to my question; the question of why the garden did not
belong to the gardener. No better epigram could be put in reply than
simply putting the Spade Guinea beside the Spade. This was the only
underground seed that I could understand. Only by having a little more
of that dull, battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle while
34
he was active. I am not altogether idle myself; but the fact remains
that the power is in the thin slip of metal we call the Spade Guinea,
not in the strong square and curve of metal which we call the Spade.
And then I suddenly remembered that as I had found gold on my ground by
accident, so richer men in the north and west counties had found coal in
their ground, also by accident.
I told the gardener that as he had found the thing he ought to keep it,
but that if he cared to sell it to me it could be valued properly, and
then sold. He said at first, with characteristic independence, that he
would like to keep it. He said it would make a brooch for his wife. But
a little later he brought it back to me without explanation. I could not
get a ray of light on the reason of his refusal; but he looked lowering
and unhappy. Had he some mystical instinct that it is just such
accidental and irrational wealth that is the doom of all peasantries?
Perhaps he dimly felt that the boy's pirate tales are true; and that
buried treasure is a thing for robbers and not for producers. Perhaps
he thought there was a curse on such capital: on the coal of the
coal-owners, on the gold of the gold-seekers. Perhaps there is.
35
THE VOTER AND THE TWO VOICES
The real evil of our Party System is commonly stated wrong. It was
stated wrong by Lord Rosebery, when he said that it prevented the best
men from devoting themselves to politics, and that it encouraged a
fanatical conflict. I doubt whether the best men ever would devote
themselves to politics. The best men devote themselves to pigs and
babies and things like that. And as for the fanatical conflict in
party politics, I wish there was more of it. The real danger of the two
parties with their two policies is that they unduly limit the outlook of
the ordinary citizen. They make him barren instead of creative, because
he is never allowed to do anything except prefer one existing policy to
another. We have not got real Democracy when the decision depends upon
the people. We shall have real Democracy when the problem depends upon
the people. The ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but
what he is going to vote about.
It is this which involves some weakness in many current aspirations
towards the extension of the suffrage; I mean that, apart from all
questions of abstract justice, it is not the smallness or largeness of
the suffrage that is at present the difficulty of Democracy. It is not
the quantity of voters, but the quality of the thing they are voting
about. A certain alternative is put before them by the powerful houses
and the highest political class. Two roads are opened to them; but they
must go down one or the other. They cannot have what they choose, but
only which they choose. To follow the process in practice we may put it
36
thus. The Suffragettes—if one may judge by their frequent ringing
of his bell—want to do something to Mr. Asquith. I have no notion
what it is. Let us say (for the sake of argument) that they want to
paint him green. We will suppose that it is entirely for that simple
purpose that they are always seeking to have private interviews with
him; it seems as profitable as any other end that I can imagine to such
an interview. Now, it is possible that the Government of the day might
go in for a positive policy of painting Mr. Asquith green; might give
that reform a prominent place in their programme. Then the party in
opposition would adopt another policy, not a policy of leaving Mr.
Asquith alone (which would be considered dangerously revolutionary), but
some alternative course of action, as, for instance, painting him red.
Then both sides would fling themselves on the people, they would both
cry that the appeal was now to the Caesar of Democracy. A dark and
dramatic air of conflict and real crisis would arise on both sides;
arrows of satire would fly and swords of eloquence flame. The Greens
would say that Socialists and free lovers might well want to paint Mr.
Asquith red; they wanted to paint the whole town red. Socialists would
indignantly reply that Socialism was the reverse of disorder, and that
they only wanted to paint Mr. Asquith red so that he might resemble
the red pillar-boxes which typified State control. The Greens would
passionately deny the charge so often brought against them by the Reds;
they would deny that they wished Mr. Asquith green in order that he
might be invisible on the green benches of the Commons, as certain
terrified animals take the colour of their environment.
37
There would be fights in the street perhaps, and abundance of ribbons,
flags, and badges, of the two colours. One crowd would sing, "Keep the
Red Flag Flying," and the other, "The Wearing of the Green." But when
the last effort had been made and the last moment come, when two
crowds were waiting in the dark outside the public building to hear the
declaration of the poll, then both sides alike would say that it was now
for democracy to do exactly what it chose. England herself, lifting her
head in awful loneliness and liberty, must speak and pronounce judgment.
Yet this might not be exactly true. England herself, lifting her head in
awful loneliness and liberty, might really wish Mr. Asquith to be pale
blue. The democracy of England in the abstract, if it had been allowed
to make up a policy for itself, might have desired him to be black
with pink spots. It might even have liked him as he is now. But a huge
apparatus of wealth, power, and printed matter has made it practically
impossible for them to bring home these other proposals, even if they
would really prefer them. No candidates will stand in the spotted
interest; for candidates commonly have to produce money either from
their own pockets or the party's; and in such circles spots are not
worn. No man in the social position of a Cabinet Minister, perhaps,
will commit himself to the pale-blue theory of Mr. Asquith; therefore it
cannot be a Government measure, therefore it cannot pass.
Nearly all the great newspapers, both pompous and frivolous, will
declare dogmatically day after day, until every one half believes
it, that red and green are the only two colours in the paint-box. THE
OBSERVER will say: "No one who knows the solid framework of politics or
38
the emphatic first principles of an Imperial people can suppose for
a moment that there is any possible compromise to be made in such a
matter; we must either fulfil our manifest racial destiny and crown the
edifice of ages with the august figure of a Green Premier, or we must
abandon our heritage, break our promise to the Empire, fling ourselves
into final anarchy, and allow the flaming and demoniac image of a Red
Premier to hover over our dissolution and our doom." The DAILY MAIL
would say: "There is no halfway house in this matter; it must be green
or red. We wish to see every honest Englishman one colour or the other."
And then some funny man in the popular Press would star the sentence
with a pun, and say that the DAILY MAIL liked its readers to be green
and its paper to be read. But no one would even dare to whisper that
there is such a thing as yellow.
For the purposes of pure logic it is clearer to argue with silly
examples than with sensible ones: because silly examples are simple. But
I could give many grave and concrete cases of the kind of thing to which
I refer. In the later part of the Boer War both parties perpetually
insisted in every speech and pamphlet that annexation was inevitable and
that it was only a question whether Liberals or Tories should do it. It
was not inevitable in the least; it would have been perfectly easy to
make peace with the Boers as Christian nations commonly make peace with
their conquered enemies. Personally I think that it would have been
better for us in the most selfish sense, better for our pocket and
prestige, if we had never effected the annexation at all; but that is a
matter of opinion. What is plain is that it was not inevitable; it was
39
not, as was said, the only possible course; there were plenty of other
courses; there were plenty of other colours in the box. Again, in the
discussion about Socialism, it is repeatedly rubbed into the public mind
that we must choose between Socialism and some horrible thing that they
call Individualism. I don't know what it means, but it seems to mean
that anybody who happens to pull out a plum is to adopt the moral
philosophy of the young Horner—and say what a good boy he is for
helping himself.
It is calmly assumed that the only two possible types of society are a
Collectivist type of society and the present society that exists at this
moment and is rather like an animated muck-heap. It is quite unnecessary
to say that I should prefer Socialism to the present state of things. I
should prefer anarchism to the present state of things. But it is simply
not the fact that Collectivism is the only other scheme for a more equal
order. A Collectivist has a perfect right to think it the only sound
scheme; but it is not the only plausible or possible scheme. We might
have peasant proprietorship; we might have the compromise of Henry
George; we might have a number of tiny communes; we might have
co-operation; we might have Anarchist Communism; we might have a hundred
things. I am not saying that any of these are right, though I cannot
imagine that any of them could be worse than the present social
madhouse, with its top-heavy rich and its tortured poor; but I say that
it is an evidence of the stiff and narrow alternative offered to the
civic mind, that the civic mind is not, generally speaking, conscious of
these other possibilities. The civic mind is not free or alert enough
40
to feel how much it has the world before it. There are at least ten
solutions of the Education question, and no one knows which Englishmen
really want. For Englishmen are only allowed to vote about the two
which are at that moment offered by the Premier and the Leader of the
Opposition. There are ten solutions of the drink question; and no one
knows which the democracy wants; for the democracy is only allowed to
fight about one Licensing Bill at a time.
So that the situation comes to this: The democracy has a right to answer
questions, but it has no right to ask them. It is still the political
aristocracy that asks the questions. And we shall not be unreasonably
cynical if we suppose that the political aristocracy will always be
rather careful what questions it asks. And if the dangerous comfort and
self-flattery of modern England continues much longer there will be less
democratic value in an English election than in a Roman saturnalia of
slaves. For the powerful class will choose two courses of action, both
of them safe for itself, and then give the democracy the gratification
of taking one course or the other. The lord will take two things so much
alike that he would not mind choosing from them blindfold—and then
for a great jest he will allow the slaves to choose.
THE MAD OFFICIAL
41
Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world. I have very
nearly done it more than once in my boyhood, and so have nearly all
my friends, born under the general doom of mortals, but especially of
moderns; I mean the doom that makes a man come almost to the end of
thinking before he comes to the first chance of living.
But the process of going mad is dull, for the simple reason that a man
does not know that it is going on. Routine and literalism and a
certain dry-throated earnestness and mental thirst, these are the very
atmosphere of morbidity. If once the man could become conscious of his
madness, he would cease to be man. He studies certain texts in Daniel
or cryptograms in Shakespeare through monstrously magnifying spectacles,
which are on his nose night and day. If once he could take off the
spectacles he would smash them. He deduces all his fantasies about the
Sixth Seal or the Anglo-Saxon Race from one unexamined and invisible
first principle. If he could once see the first principle, he would see
that it is not there.
This slow and awful self-hypnotism of error is a process that can occur
not only with individuals, but also with whole societies. It is hard
to pick out and prove; that is why it is hard to cure. But this mental
degeneration may be brought to one test, which I truly believe to be a
real test. A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things,
so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. Crusaders not cutting
their beards till they found Jerusalem, Jacobins calling each other
Harmodius and Epaminondas when their names were Jacques and Jules, these
42
are wild things, but they were done in wild spirits at a wild moment.
But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State
is growing insane. For instance, I have a gun license. For all I know,
this would logically allow me to fire off fifty-nine enormous field-guns
day and night in my back garden. I should not be surprised at a man
doing it; for it would be great fun. But I should be surprised at the
neighbours putting up with it, and regarding it as an ordinary thing
merely because it might happen to fulfill the letter of my license.
Or, again, I have a dog license; and I may have the right (for all I
know) to turn ten thousand wild dogs loose in Buckinghamshire. I should
not be surprised if the law were like that; because in modern England
there is practically no law to be surprised at. I should not be
surprised even at the man who did it; for a certain kind of man, if he
lived long under the English landlord system, might do anything. But I
should be surprised at the people who consented to stand it. I should,
in other words, think the world a little mad if the incident, were
received in silence.
Now things every bit as wild as this are being received in silence every
day. All strokes slip on the smoothness of a polished wall. All blows
fall soundless on the softness of a padded cell. For madness is a
passive as well as an active state: it is a paralysis, a refusal of
the nerves to respond to the normal stimuli, as well as an unnatural
stimulation. There are commonwealths, plainly to be distinguished here
43
and there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor, or from
glory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only in
silence, but with serenity. The face still smiles while the limbs,
literally and loathsomely, are dropping from the body. These are peoples
that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they
give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start
or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used
to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the
breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going
off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility,
with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all dotted with
industrious lunatics. One of these countries is modern England.
Now here is an actual instance, a small case of how our social
conscience really works: tame in spirit, wild in result, blank in
realisation; a thing without the light of mind in it. I take this
paragraph from a daily paper:—"At Epping, yesterday, Thomas
Woolbourne, a Lambourne labourer, and his wife were summoned for
neglecting their five children. Dr. Alpin said he was invited by the
inspector of the N.S.P.C.C. to visit defendants' cottage. Both the
cottage and the children were dirty. The children looked exceedingly
well in health, but the conditions would be serious in case of illness.
Defendants were stated to be sober. The man was discharged. The woman,
who said she was hampered by the cottage having no water supply and
that she was ill, was sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment. The sentence
caused surprise, and the woman was removed crying, 'Lord save me!'"
44
I know no name for this but Chinese. It calls up the mental picture of
some archaic and changeless Eastern Court, in which men with dried faces
and stiff ceremonial costumes perform some atrocious cruelty to the
accompaniment of formal proverbs and sentences of which the very meaning
has been forgotten. In both cases the only thing in the whole farrago
that can be called real is the wrong. If we apply the lightest touch of
reason to the whole Epping prosecution it dissolves into nothing.
I here challenge any person in his five wits to tell me what that woman
was sent to prison for. Either it was for being poor, or it was for
being ill. Nobody could suggest, nobody will suggest, nobody, as a
matter of fact, did suggest, that she had committed any other crime.
The doctor was called in by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children. Was this woman guilty of cruelty to children? Not in the
least. Did the doctor say she was guilty of cruelty to children? Not in
the least. Was these any evidence even remotely bearing on the sin of
cruelty? Not a rap. The worse that the doctor could work himself up
to saying was that though the children were "exceedingly" well, the
conditions would be serious in case of illness. If the doctor will tell
me any conditions that would be comic in case of illness, I shall attach
more weight to his argument.
Now this is the worst effect of modern worry. The mad doctor has
gone mad. He is literally and practically mad; and still he is quite
literally and practically a doctor. The only question is the old one,
45
Quis docebit ipsum doctorem? Now cruelty to children is an utterly
unnatural thing; instinctively accursed of earth and heaven. But neglect
of children is a natural thing; like neglect of any other duty, it is
a mere difference of degree that divides extending arms and legs in
calisthenics and extending them on the rack. It is a mere difference of
degree that separates any operation from any torture. The thumb-screw
can easily be called Manicure. Being pulled about by wild horses can
easily be called Massage. The modern problem is not so much what people
will endure as what they will not endure. But I fear I interrupt.... The
boiling oil is boiling; and the Tenth Mandarin is already reciting the
"Seventeen Serious Principles and the Fifty-three Virtues of the Sacred
Emperor."
46
THE ENCHANTED MAN
When I arrived to see the performance of the Buckinghamshire Players,
who acted Miss Gertrude Robins's POT LUCK at Naphill a short time ago,
it is the distressing, if scarcely surprising, truth that I entered very
late. This would have mattered little, I hope, to any one, but that late
comers had to be forced into front seats. For a real popular English
audience always insists on crowding in the back part of the hall; and
(as I have found in many an election) will endure the most unendurable
taunts rather than come forward. The English are a modest people; that
is why they are entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen to
be immodest. In theatrical affairs the fact is strangely notable; and in
most playhouses we find the bored people in front and the eager people
behind.
As far as the performance went I was quite the reverse of a bored
person; but I may have been a boring person, especially as I was thus
required to sit in the seats of the scornful. It will be a happy day in
the dramatic world when all ladies have to take off their hats and all
critics have to take off their heads. The people behind will have a
chance then. And as it happens, in this case, I had not so much taken
off my head as lost it. I had lost it on the road; on that strange
journey that was the cause of my coming in late. I have a troubled
recollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech;
I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice people
afterwards, but talking to them jerkily and with half a head, as a man
47
talks when he has one eye on a clock.
And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock,
hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure
for such bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I
was moonstruck. A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had
inexplicably got in between me and all other scenes. If any one had
asked me I could not have said what it was; I cannot say now. Nothing
had occurred to me; except the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge
of a hill. It was not an adventure; it was a vision.
I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a small
car that found its way across the hills towards Naphill. But as
night blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way
increasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent.
Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a
yet steeper road like a ladder.
At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower
of Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage,
and the driver saying that "it couldn't be done." I got out of the car
and suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.
From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which
I am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his
great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts
48
of South Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt."
The word "veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch.
But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him
a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England.
Well, if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for
it in England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable
veldts. I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many
different hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a finite
horizon, free and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little
more desolate than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as
that English hill was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.
I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if
at a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on
that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frost
fastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softening
forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an
abyss which seemed unfathomable. One fancied the world was soundless
only because it was bottomless: it seemed as if all songs and cries
had been swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of the
hills. I could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that if
I hurled huge stones there would be no noise of reply. A dumb devil had
bewitched the landscape: but that again does not express the best or
worst of it. All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something so
inhuman that it has no human name. A horror of unconsciousness lay on
them; that is the nearest phrase I know. It was as if one were looking
49
at the back of the world; and the world did not know it. I had taken the
universe in the rear. I was behind the scenes. I was eavesdropping upon
an unconscious creation.
I shall not express what the place expressed. I am not even sure that it
is a thing that ought to be expressed. There was something heathen about
its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in
some of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poetical
phrases of the populace, "a God-forsaken place." Yet something was
present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression.
Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place. It
had been put to sleep. In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales about
princes turned to marble and princesses changed to snow. We were in a
land where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare. The moon
looked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; the
one white eye of the world.
There was never a better play than POT LUCK; for it tells a tale with a
point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. There
were never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players: for
they were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggeration
which is the transition from life to art. But all the time I was
mesmerised by the moon; I saw all these men and women as enchanted
things. The poacher shot pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; the
wife hid pheasants; they were all (especially the policeman) as true
as death. But there was something more true to death than true to life
50
about it all: the figures were frozen with a magic frost of sleep or
fear or custom such as does not cramp the movements of the poor men of
other lands. I looked at the poacher and the policeman and the gun; then
at the gun and the policeman and the poacher; and I could find no name
for the fancy that haunted and escaped me. The poacher believed in the
Game Laws as much as the policeman. The poacher's wife not only believed
in the Game Laws, but protected them as well as him. She got a promise
from her husband that he would never shoot another pheasant. Whether he
kept it I doubt; I fancy he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that.
But I am sure he never shot a policeman. For we live in an enchanted
land.
51
THE SUN WORSHIPPER
There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt.
And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in
that sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But the
warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as
fate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that
argument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and
the slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory,
so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern
doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which is
called the materialist theory of history. The theory is, roughly, this:
that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic
motive. In short, history is a science; a science of the search for
food.
Now I desire, in passing only, to point out that this is not merely
untrue, but actually the reverse of the truth. It is putting it too
feebly to say that the history of man is not only economic. Man would
not have any history if he were only economic. The need for food is
certainly universal, so universal that it is not even human. Cows
have an economic motive, and apparently (I dare not say what ethereal
delicacies may be in a cow) only an economic motive. The cow eats grass
anywhere and never eats anything else. In short, the cow does fulfill
the materialist theory of history: that is why the cow has no history.
"A History of Cows" would be one of the simplest and briefest of
52
standard works. But if some cows thought it wicked to eat long grass
and persecuted all who did so; if the cow with the crumpled horn were
worshipped by some cows and gored to death by others; if cows began to
have obvious moral preferences over and above a desire for grass, then
cows would begin to have a history. They would also begin to have a
highly unpleasant time, which is perhaps the same thing.
The economic motive is not merely not inside all history; it is actually
outside all history. It belongs to Biology or the Science of Life; that
is, it concerns things like cows, that are not so very much alive. Men
are far too much alive to get into the science of anything; for them we
have made the art of history. To say that human actions have depended
on economic support is like saying that they have depended on having two
legs. It accounts for action, but not for such varied action; it is a
condition, but not a motive; it is too universal to be useful. Certainly
a soldier wins the Victoria Cross on two legs; he also runs away on two
legs. But if our object is to discover whether he will become a V.C. or
a coward the most careful inspection of his legs will yield us little or
no information. In the same way a man will want food if he is a dreamy
romantic tramp, and will want food if he is a toiling and sweating
millionaire. A man must be supported on food as he must be supported
on legs. But cows (who have no history) are not only furnished more
generously in the matter of legs, but can see their food on a much
grander and more imaginative scale. A cow can lift up her eyes to the
hills and see uplands and peaks of pure food. Yet we never see the
horizon broken by crags of cake or happy hills of cheese.
53
So far the cow (who has no history) seems to have every other advantage.
But history—the whole point of history—precisely is that
some two legged soldiers ran away while others, of similar anatomical
structure, did not. The whole point of history precisely is: some people
(like poets and tramps) chance getting money by disregarding it, while
others (such as millionaires) will absolutely lose money for the fun
of bothering about it. There would be no history if there were only
economic history. All the historical events have been due to the
twists and turns given to the economic instinct by forces that were not
economic. For instance, this theory traces the French war of Edward
III to a quarrel about the French wines. Any one who has even smelt the
Middle Ages must feel fifty answers spring to his lips; but in this case
one will suffice. There would have been no such war, then, if we all
drank water like cows. But when one is a man one enters the world
of historic choice. The act of drinking wine is one that requires
explanation. So is the act of not drinking wine.
But the capitalist can get much more fun out of the doctrine.
When strikes were splitting England right and left a little while ago,
an ingenious writer, humorously describing himself as a Liberal, said
that they were entirely due to the hot weather. The suggestion was
eagerly taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do
not see why it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable
uprisings in history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is
54
generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on
the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from
captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula
(arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic
shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for
a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt
employed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of
making bricks with nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic
intellectual excuses they may have put forward for their strange and
unnatural conduct in walking out when the prison door was open, there
can be no doubt that the real cause was the warm weather. Such a climate
notoriously also produces delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr.
Kipling describes. And it was while their brains were disordered by the
heat that the Jews fancied that they were founding a nation, that they
were led by a prophet, and, in short, that they were going to be of some
importance in the affairs of the world.
Nor can the historical student fail to note that the French monarchy was
pulled down in August; and that August is a month in summer.
In spite of all this, however, I have some little difficulty myself
in accepting so simple a form of the Materialist Theory of History (at
these words all Marxian Socialists will please bow their heads three
times), and I rather think that exceptions might be found to the
principle. Yet it is not chiefly such exceptions that embarrass my
belief in it.
55
No; my difficulty is rather in accounting for the strange coincidence by
which the shafts of Apollo split us exclusively along certain lines of
class and of economics. I cannot understand why all solicitors did not
leave off soliciting, all doctors leave off doctoring, all judges leave
off judging, all benevolent bankers leave off lending money at high
interest, and all rising politicians leave off having nothing to add to
what their right honourable friend told the House about eight years
ago. The quaint theoretic plea of the workers, that they were striking
because they were ill paid, seems to receive a sort of wild and hazy
confirmation from the fact that, throughout the hottest weather, judges
and other persons who are particularly well paid showed no disposition
to strike. I have to fall back therefore on metaphysical fancies of my
own; and I continue to believe that the anger of the English poor (to
steal a phrase from Sir Thomas Browne) came from something in man that
is other than the elements and that owes no homage unto the sun.
When comfortable people come to talking stuff of that sort, it is really
time that the comfortable classes made a short summary and confession
of what they have really done with the very poor Englishman. The dawn of
the mediaeval civilisation found him a serf; which is a different thing
from a slave. He had security; although the man belonged to the land
rather than the land to the man. He could not be evicted; his rent could
not be raised. In practice, it came to something like this: that if the
lord rode down his cabbages he had not much chance of redress; but he
had the chance of growing more cabbages. He had direct access to the
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means of production.
Since then the centuries in England have achieved something different;
and something which, fortunately, is perfectly easy to state. There is
no doubt about what we have done. We have kept the inequality, but we
have destroyed the security. The man is not tied to the land, as in
serfdom; nor is the land tied to the man, as in a peasantry. The rich
man has entered into an absolute ownership of farms and fields; and (in
the modern industrial phrase) he has locked out the English people. They
can only find an acre to dig or a house to sleep in by accepting such
competitive and cruel terms as he chooses to impose.
Well, what would happen then, over the larger parts of the planet, parts
inhabited by savages? Savages, of course, would hunt and fish. That
retreat for the English poor was perceived; and that retreat was cut
off. Game laws were made to extend over districts like the Arctic snows
or the Sahara. The rich man had property over animals he had no more
dreamed of than a governor of Roman Africa had dreamed of a giraffe.
He owned all the birds that passed over his land: he might as well have
owned all the clouds that passed over it. If a rabbit ran from Smith's
land to Brown's land, it belonged to Brown, as if it were his pet dog.
The logical answer to this would be simple: Any one stung on Brown's
land ought to be able to prosecute Brown for keeping a dangerous wasp
without a muzzle.
Thus the poor man was forced to be a tramp along the roads and to sleep
57
in the open. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off.
A landless man in England can be punished for behaving in the only way
that a landless man can behave: for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or
on a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous sense
of fun) as that of having no visible means of subsistence.
The last possibility, of course, is that upon which all human beings
would fall back if they were sinking in a swamp or impaled on a spike
or deserted on an island. It is that of calling out for pity to the
passerby. That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A
man in England can be sent to prison for asking another man for help in
the name of God.
You have done all these things, and by so doing you have forced the poor
to serve the rich, and to serve them on the terms of the rich. They have
still one weapon left against the extremes of insult and unfairness:
that weapon is their numbers and the necessity of those numbers to the
working of that vast and slavish machine. And because they still had
this last retreat (which we call the Strike), because this retreat
was also perceived, there was talk of this retreat being also cut off.
Whereupon the workmen became suddenly and violently angry; and struck at
your Boards and Committees here, there, and wherever they could. And you
opened on them the eyes of owls, and said, "It must be the sunshine."
You could only go on saying, "The sun, the sun." That was what the man
in Ibsen said, when he had lost his wits.
58
THE WRONG INCENDIARY
I stood looking at the Coronation Procession—I mean the one
in Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, I
believe, had some success in London—and I was seriously impressed.
Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise that
I was quite right. Never before have I realised how right I was in
maintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism: the
smaller the field the taller the tower. There were things in our local
procession that did not (one might even reverently say, could not) occur
in the London procession. One of the most prominent citizens in our
procession (for instance) had his face blacked. Another rode on a pony
which wore pink and blue trousers. I was not present at the Metropolitan
affair, and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as the
eyewitness may always offer to the absentee. But I believe with some
firmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant.
But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak, but of
something that occurred before it. In the field beyond the end of my
garden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped; a hill of every kind
of rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants; broken chairs, dead
trees, rags, shavings, newspapers, new religions, in pamphlet form,
reports of the Eugenic Congress, and so on. All this refuse, material
59
and mental, it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on the
day when the King was crowned. The following is an account of the rather
strange thing that really happened. I do not know whether it was any
sort of symbol; but I narrate it just as it befell.
In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what I
supposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loose
stones. Then it grew louder, and I thought somebody was shooting out
cartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big
stones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was also
a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every
now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knew
what it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across
two meadows smote me where I stood. "Oh, my holy aunt," I thought,
"they've mistaken the Coronation Day."
And yet when I eyed the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly like
a bonfire or any ritual illumination. It was too chaotic, and too close
to the houses of the town. All one side of a cottage was painted pink
with the giant brush of flame; the next side, by contrast, was painted
as black as tar. Along the front of this ran a blackening rim or rampart
edged with a restless red ribbon that danced and doubled and devoured
like a scarlet snake; and beyond it was nothing but a deathly fulness of
light.
I put on some clothes and went down the road; all the dull or startling
60
noises in that din of burning growing louder and louder as I walked. The
heaviest sound was that of an incessant cracking and crunching, as if
some giant with teeth of stone was breaking up the bones of the world. I
had not yet come within sight of the real heart and habitat of the fire;
but the strong red light, like an unnatural midnight sunset, powdered
the grayest grass with gold and flushed the few tall trees up to the
last fingers of their foliage. Behind them the night was black and
cavernous; and one could only trace faintly the ashen horizon beyond the
dark and magic Wilton Woods. As I went, a workman on a bicycle shot a
rood past me; then staggered from his machine and shouted to me to tell
him where the fire was. I answered that I was going to see, but thought
it was the cottages by the wood-yard. He said, "My God!" and vanished.
A little farther on I found grass and pavement soaking and flooded, and
the red and yellow flames repainted in pools and puddles. Beyond were
dim huddles of people and a small distant voice shouting out orders. The
fire-engines were at work. I went on among the red reflections, which
seemed like subterranean fires; I had a singular sensation of being in a
very important dream. Oddly enough, this was increased when I found that
most of my friends and neighbours were entangled in the crowd. Only in
dreams do we see familiar faces so vividly against a black background of
midnight. I was glad to find (for the workman cyclist's sake) that
the fire was not in the houses by the wood-yard, but in the wood-yard
itself. There was no fear for human life, and the thing was seemingly
accidental; though there were the usual ugly whispers about rivalry and
revenge. But for all that I could not shake off my dream-drugged soul a
61
swollen, tragic, portentous sort of sensation, that it all had something
to do with the crowning of the English King, and the glory or the end
of England. It was not till I saw the puddles and the ashes in broad
daylight next morning that I was fundamentally certain that my midnight
adventure had not happened outside this world.
But I was more arrogant than the ancient Emperors Pharaoh or
Nebuchadnezzar; for I attempted to interpret my own dream. The fire was
feeding upon solid stacks of unused beech or pine, gray and white piles
of virgin wood. It was an orgy of mere waste; thousands of good
things were being killed before they had ever existed. Doors, tables,
walking-sticks, wheelbarrows, wooden swords for boys, Dutch dolls for
girls I could hear the cry of each uncreated thing as it expired in the
flames. And then I thought of that other noble tower of needless things
that stood in the field beyond my garden; the bonfire, the mountain of
vanities, that is meant for burning; and how it stood dark and lonely in
the meadow, and the birds hopped on its corners and the dew touched and
spangled its twigs. And I remembered that there are two kinds of fires,
the Bad Fire and the Good Fire the last must surely be the meaning of
Bonfire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, of
things that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things,
of things that we do want; like all that wealth of wood that might have
made dolls and chairs and tables, but was only making a hueless ash.
And then I saw, in my vision, that just as there are two fires, so there
are two revolutions. And I saw that the whole mad modern world is a race
62
between them. Which will happen first—the revolution in which
bad things shall perish, or that other revolution, in which good things
shall perish also? One is the riot that all good men, even the most
conservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the
face of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the
throat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is
possible, take tyranny and usury and public treason and bind them into
bundles and burn them. And the other is the disruption that may come
prematurely, negatively, and suddenly in the night; like the fire in my
little town.
It may come because the mere strain of modern life is unbearable; and in
it even the things that men do desire may break down; marriage and
fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man. The two
revolutions, white and black, are racing each other like two railway
trains; I cannot guess the issue...but even as I thought of it, the
tallest turret of the timber stooped and faltered and came down in a
cataract of noises. And the fire, finding passage, went up with a spout
like a fountain. It stood far up among the stars for an instant, a
blazing pillar of brass fit for a pagan conqueror, so high that one
could fancy it visible away among the goblin trees of Burnham or along
the terraces of the Chiltern Hills.
63
THE FREE MAN
The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men
find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally
to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save
their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice. Ruskin rebuked
Coleridge for praising freedom, and said that no man would wish the sun
to be free. It seems enough to answer that no man would wish to be the
sun. Speaking as a Liberal, I have much more sympathy with the idea of
Joshua stopping the sun in heaven than with the idea of Ruskin trotting
his daily round in imitation of its regularity. Joshua was a Radical,
and his astronomical act was distinctly revolutionary. For all
revolution is the mastering of matter by the spirit of man, the
emergence of that human authority within us which, in the noble words of
Sir Thomas Browne, "owes no homage unto the sun."
Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant
merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a
tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in
selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning
of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real
idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the
word "make" about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as
a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man "makes his
way" through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the
Romans. When a man "makes a friend," he makes a man. And in the third
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case we talk of a man "making love," as if he were (as, indeed, he is)
creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form
of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in
man, or, if you like the word, the artist.
In its secondary political sense liberty is the living influence of the
citizen on the State in the direction of moulding or deflecting it. Men
are the only creatures that evidently possess it. On the one hand, the
eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness. On the other hand, ants,
bees, and beavers exhibit the highest miracle of the State influencing
the citizen; but no perceptible trace of the citizen influencing the
State. You may, if you like, call the ants a democracy as you may
call the bees a despotism. But I fancy that the architectural ant who
attempted to introduce an art nouveau style of ant-hill would have a
career as curt and fruitless as the celebrated bee who wanted to swarm
alone. The isolation of this idea in humanity is akin to its religious
character; but it is not even in humanity by any means equally
distributed. The idea that the State should not only be supported by
its children, like the ant-hill, but should be constantly criticised and
reconstructed by them, is an idea stronger in Christendom than any
other part of the planet; stronger in Western than Eastern Europe. And
touching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and act
within limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has been
the peculiar honour of our own country. For my part I greatly prefer the
Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional. I have
no objection to Britannia ruling the waves. I draw the line when
65
she begins to rule the dry land—and such damnably dry land
too—as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerity
in the vulgar chorus that "Britons never shall be slaves." We had no
equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of.
And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old
optimistic prophecy that "Britons never shall be slaves."
The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England than
it has been for the last twenty years. Never before has it been so easy
to slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking people
up. Never was it so easy to silence awkward questions, or to protect
high-placed officials. Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuarts
rather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act. Two years ago we abolished
the Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary. We passed
a law (which is now in force) that an Englishman's punishment shall not
depend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who have
got hold of him. But this is not the only case. The scorn of liberty
is in the air. A newspaper is seized by the police in Trafalgar Square
without a word of accusation or explanation. The Home Secretary says
that in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end
of the matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage.
The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matter
drops.
Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power of
criticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly require
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reconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words,
it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent but
discontented citizen wants to say. He does not want to spit on the
Bible, or to run about without clothes, or to read the worst page in
Zola from the pulpit of St. Paul's. Therefore the forbidding of these
things (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and special
sense. It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man. But the normal
man, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest against
unfair law courts. He does want to expose brutalities of the police.
He does want to make game of a vulgar pawnbroker who is made a Peer. He
does want publicly to warn people against unscrupulous capitalists and
suspicious finance. If he is run in for doing this (as he will be)
he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of the
magistrate who tries him. If he is sent to prison (as he will be) he
does want to have a clear and civilised sentence, telling him when he
will come out. And these are literally and exactly the things that
he now cannot get. That is the almost cloying humour of the present
situation. I can say abnormal things in modern magazines. It is the
normal things that I am not allowed to say. I can write in some solemn
quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can
write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I
should like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rational
criticism of the men and institutions of my country.
The present condition of England is briefly this: That no Englishman can
say in public a twentieth part of what he says in private. One cannot
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say, for instance, that—But I am afraid I must leave out
that instance, because one cannot say it. I cannot prove my
case—because it is so true.
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THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER
We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded
that he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness is
extreme, and my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels.
But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that. Some yards at
least from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught
my eye; and thus the joke has been spoiled. Of course I have quite
constantly walked into another man's house, thinking it was my own
house; my visits became almost monotonous. But walking into my own house
and thinking it was another man's house is a flight of poetic detachment
still beyond me. Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded
man must feel I really felt the other day; and very pleasant sensations
they were. The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter
and the last chapter; and to knock at a strange door and find a nice
wife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance.
Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of the
same kind. For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin
and unvisited (as far as I was concerned), and I suddenly found I was
treading in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twenty
years old.
It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost
unnatural decay; thickets and heaths that have grown out of what were
once great gardens. Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers,
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as it says in some good poetic couplet which I forget; and there is
something singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that
were so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand in
the thicket. One almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel; with the
dog evolved into a wolf.
This desolate garden-land had been even in my youth scrappily planned
out for building. The half-built or empty houses had appeared quite
threateningly on the edge of this heath even when I walked over it years
ago and almost as a boy. I was astonished that the building had gone
no farther; I suppose somebody went bankrupt and somebody else disliked
building. But I remember, especially along one side of this tangle or
coppice, that there had once been a row of half-built houses. The brick
of which they were built was a sort of plain pink; everything else was a
blinding white; the houses smoked with white dust and white sawdust;
and on many of the windows were rubbed those round rough disks of white
which always delighted me as a child. They looked like the white eyes of
some blind giant.
I could see the crude, parched pink-and-white villas still; though I had
not thought at all of them for a quarter of my life; and had not thought
much of them even when I saw them. Then I was an idle, but eager youth
walking out from London; now I was a most reluctantly busy middle-aged
person, coming in from the country. Youth, I think, seems farther off
than childhood, for it made itself more of a secret. Like a prenatal
picture, distant, tiny, and quite distinct, I saw this heath on which I
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stood; and I looked around for the string of bright, half-baked villas.
They still stood there; but they were quite russet and weather-stained,
as if they had stood for centuries.
I remembered exactly what I had done on that day long ago. I had half
slid on a miry descent; it was still there; a little lower I had knocked
off the top of a thistle; the thistles had not been discouraged, but
were still growing. I recalled it because I had wondered why one knocks
off the tops of thistles; and then I had thought of Tarquin; and then I
had recited most of Macaulay's VIRGINIA to myself, for I was young. And
then I came to a tattered edge where the very tuft had whitened with
the sawdust and brick-dust from the new row of houses; and two or three
green stars of dock and thistle grew spasmodically about the blinding
road.
I remembered how I had walked up this new one-sided street all those
years ago; and I remembered what I had thought. I thought that this
red and white glaring terrace at noon was really more creepy and more
lonesome than a glimmering churchyard at midnight. The churchyard could
only be full of the ghosts of the dead; but these houses were full of
the ghosts of the unborn. And a man can never find a home in the future
as he can find it in the past. I was always fascinated by that mediaeval
notion of erecting a rudely carpentered stage in the street, and acting
on it a miracle play of the Holy Family or the Last Judgment. And I
thought to myself that each of these glaring, gaping, new jerry-built
boxes was indeed a rickety stage erected for the acting of a real
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miracle play; that human family that is almost the holy one, and that
human death that is near to the last judgment.
For some foolish reason the last house but one in that imperfect row
especially haunted me with its hollow grin and empty window-eyes.
Something in the shape of this brick-and-mortar skeleton was attractive;
and there being no workmen about, I strolled into it for curiosity and
solitude. I gave, with all the sky-deep gravity of youth, a benediction
upon the man who was going to live there. I even remember that for the
convenience of meditation I called him James Harrogate.
As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly played
the fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk in
my pocket, I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls;
things addressed to Mr. Harrogate. A dim memory told me that I had
written up in what I supposed to be the dining-room:
James Harrogate, thank God for meat,
Then eat and eat and eat and eat,
or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric
was scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something
beginning:
When laying what you call your head,
O Harrogate, upon your bed,
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and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quite
vividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing,
and the places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in
memory; for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a century
the house was very different.
I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its
windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its low
square windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a stream
of lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least,
was standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthy
sentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on the
wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that
lamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express
if I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in red
chalk upon the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about to
withdraw, a mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinct
accents to a very smart suburban maid, "Does Mr. James Harrogate live
here?"
She said he didn't; but that she would inquire, in case I was looking
for him in the neighbourhood; but I excused her from such exertion. I
had one moment's impulse to look for him all over the world; and then
decided not to look for him at all.
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THE PRIEST OF SPRING
The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day.
But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty
but of revolution, There are two great armies of the human intellect
who will fight till the end on this vital point, whether Easter is to
be congratulated on fitting in with the Spring—or the Spring on
fitting in with Easter.
The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a
story; and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed
very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like
mathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind
are like mere pleasures of the body. That is, they are mere pleasures,
though they may be gigantic pleasures; they can never by a mere increase
of themselves amount to happiness. A man just about to be hanged may
enjoy his breakfast; especially if it be his favourite breakfast; and
in the same way he may enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy,
especially if it is his favourite heresy. But whether he can enjoy
either of them does not depend on either of them; it depends upon his
spiritual attitude towards a subsequent event. And that event is really
interesting to the soul; because it is the end of a story and (as some
hold) the end of a person.
Now it is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple for
our scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about
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true religion, but about false religions too; so that their account of
mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself
to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance)
that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis
or Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation,
they have got the whole notion of him wrong. Nobody, to begin with, is
sufficiently interested in decaying vegetables, as such, to make any
particular mystery or disguise about them; and certainly not enough to
disguise them under the image of a very handsome young man, which is a
vastly more interesting thing. If Adonis was connected with the fall
of leaves in autumn and the return of flowers in spring, the process of
thought was quite different. It is a process of thought which springs
up spontaneously in all children and young artists; it springs up
spontaneously in all healthy societies. It is very difficult to explain
in a diseased society.
The brain of man is subject to short and strange snatches of sleep. A
cloud seals the city of reason or rests upon the sea of imagination; a
dream that darkens as much, whether it is a nightmare of atheism or a
daydream of idolatry. And just as we have all sprung from sleep with a
start and found ourselves saying some sentence that has no meaning, save
in the mad tongues of the midnight; so the human mind starts from its
trances of stupidity with some complete phrase upon its lips; a complete
phrase which is a complete folly. Unfortunately it is not like the dream
sentence, generally forgotten in the putting on of boots or the putting
in of breakfast. This senseless aphorism, invented when man's mind was
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asleep, still hangs on his tongue and entangles all his relations to
rational and daylight things. All our controversies are confused by
certain kinds of phrases which are not merely untrue, but were
always unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were always
intrinsically useless. We recognise them wherever a man talks of "the
survival of the fittest," meaning only the survival of the survivors; or
wherever a man says that the rich "have a stake in the country," as
if the poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat; or
where a man talks about "going on towards Progress," which only means
going on towards going on; or when a man talks about "government by the
wise few," as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons. "The wise
few" must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very
foolish who think themselves wise.
There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselves
saying, even after they are more or less awake, by which I am
particularly irritated. It arose in the popularised science of the
nineteenth century, especially in connection with the study of myths and
religions. The fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takes
the form of saying "This god or hero really represents the sun." Or
"Apollo killing the Python MEANS that the summer drives out the winter."
Or "The King dying in a western battle is a SYMBOL of the sun setting
in the west." Now I should really have thought that even the skeptical
professors, whose skulls are as shallow as frying-pans, might have
reflected that human beings never think or feel like this. Consider what
is involved in this supposition. It presumes that primitive man went out
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for a walk and saw with great interest a big burning spot on the sky. He
then said to primitive woman, "My dear, we had better keep this quiet.
We mustn't let it get about. The children and the slaves are so very
sharp. They might discover the sun any day, unless we are very careful.
So we won't call it 'the sun,' but I will draw a picture of a man
killing a snake; and whenever I do that you will know what I mean.
The sun doesn't look at all like a man killing a snake; so nobody can
possibly know. It will be a little secret between us; and while the
slaves and the children fancy I am quite excited with a grand tale of
a writhing dragon and a wrestling demigod, I shall really MEAN this
delicious little discovery, that there is a round yellow disc up in the
air." One does not need to know much mythology to know that this is a
myth. It is commonly called the Solar Myth.
Quite plainly, of course, the case was just the other way. The god
was never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun. The sun was a
hieroglyph representing the god. Primitive man (with whom my friend
Dombey is no doubt well acquainted) went out with his head full of gods
and heroes, because that is the chief use of having a head. Then he saw
the sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distress
of nightfall, and he said, "That is how the face of the god would shine
when he had slain the dragon," or "That is how the whole world would
bleed to westward, if the god were slain at last."
No human being was ever really so unnatural as to worship Nature. No
man, however indulgent (as I am) to corpulency, ever worshipped a man
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as round as the sun or a woman as round as the moon. No man, however
attracted to an artistic attenuation, ever really believed that the
Dryad was as lean and stiff as the tree. We human beings have never
worshipped Nature; and indeed, the reason is very simple. It is that all
human beings are superhuman beings. We have printed our own image upon
Nature, as God has printed His image upon us. We have told the enormous
sun to stand still; we have fixed him on our shields, caring no more
for a star than for a starfish. And when there were powers of Nature we
could not for the time control, we have conceived great beings in human
shape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the
march and victory of Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea is
his, and he made it. In other words, what the savage really said about
the sea was, "Only my fetish Mumbo could raise such mountains out of
mere water." What the savage really said about the sun was, "Only my
great great-grandfather Jumbo could deserve such a blazing crown."
About all these myths my own position is utterly and even sadly simple.
I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that
one of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are
no real ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real
bank-notes. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to
those of us that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted,
even a false god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is the
second place. When once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down before
Him, offering flowers in spring as flames in winter. "My love is like a
red, red rose" does not mean that the poet is praising roses under the
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allegory of a young lady. "My love is an arbutus" does not mean that the
author was a botanist so pleased with a particular arbutus tree that he
said he loved it. "Who art the moon and regent of my sky" does not mean
that Juliet invented Romeo to account for the roundness of the moon.
"Christ is the Sun of Easter" does not mean that the worshipper is
praising the sun under the emblem of Christ. Goddess or god can clothe
themselves with the spring or summer; but the body is more than raiment.
Religion takes almost disdainfully the dress of Nature; and indeed
Christianity has done as well with the snows of Christmas as with the
snow-drops of spring. And when I look across the sun-struck fields, I
know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely in the spring, for
spring alone, being always returning, would be always sad. There is
somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with flowers: and my
pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the resurrection of the
dead.
THE REAL JOURNALIST
Our age which has boasted of realism will fail chiefly through lack of
reality. Never, I fancy, has there been so grave and startling a divorce
between the real way a thing is done and the look of it when it is
done. I take the nearest and most topical instance to hand a newspaper.
Nothing looks more neat and regular than a newspaper, with its parallel
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columns, its mechanical printing, its detailed facts and figures, its
responsible, polysyllabic leading articles. Nothing, as a matter
of fact, goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more
hairbreadth escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random
compromises, or barely averted catastrophes. Seen from the outside, it
seems to come round as automatically as the clock and as silently as the
dawn. Seen from the inside, it gives all its organisers a gasp of relief
every morning to see that it has come out at all; that it has come out
without the leading article upside down or the Pope congratulated on
discovering the North Pole.
I will give an instance (merely to illustrate my thesis of unreality)
from the paper that I know best. Here is a simple story, a little
episode in the life of a journalist, which may be amusing and
instructive: the tale of how I made a great mistake in quotation. There
are really two stories: the story as seen from the outside, by a
man reading the paper; and the story seen from the inside, by the
journalists shouting and telephoning and taking notes in shorthand
through the night.
This is the outside story; and it reads like a dreadful quarrel. The
notorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy
pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics,
long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant
leader of the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his
fanatic soul. In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and not
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having the fear of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote
the line "that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high." This he said
because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because
he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and
forgotten rhyme called 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard'. Anyhow, that
orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five
letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the
mistake.
But the odd thing is that scarcely any of them could conceive that it
was a mistake. The first wrote in the tone of one wearied of epigrams,
and cried, "What is the joke NOW?" Another professed (and practised, for
all I know, God help him) that he had read through all Shakespeare and
failed to find the line. A third wrote in a sort of moral distress,
asking, as in confidence, if Gray was really a plagiarist. They were a
noble collection; but they all subtly assumed an element of leisure and
exactitude in the recipient's profession and character which is far from
the truth. Let us pass on to the next act of the external tragedy.
In Monday's issue of the same paper appeared a letter from the same
culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to
Shakespeare, but to a poet whom he called Grey. Which was another
cropper—or whopper. This strange and illiterate outbreak was
printed by the editor with the justly scornful title, "Mr. Chesterton
'Explains'?" Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the
meaning of the sarcastic quotation marks. They meant, of course, "Here
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is a man who doesn't know Gray from Shakespeare; he tries to patch it up
and he can't even spell Gray. And that is what he calls an Explanation."
That is the perfectly natural inference of the reader from the letter,
the mistake, and the headline—as seen from the outside. The
falsehood was serious; the editorial rebuke was serious. The stern
editor and the sombre, baffled contributor confront each other as the
curtain falls.
And now I will tell you exactly what really happened. It is honestly
rather amusing; it is a story of what journals and journalists really
are. A monstrously lazy man lives in South Bucks partly by writing a
column in the Saturday Daily News. At the time he usually writes it
(which is always at the last moment) his house is unexpectedly invaded
by infants of all shapes and sizes. His Secretary is called away; and
he has to cope with the invading pigmies. Playing with children is a
glorious thing; but the journalist in question has never understood
why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not
of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with
gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous
complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful
eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's
bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his
turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on
the sister's picture book, and whether such conduct does not justify the
sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lighted match.
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Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest
morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday
article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. He wildly
calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere for
a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair,
wondering what on earth he shall write about. A drumming of fists on
the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his
thoughts; and he is able to observe some newspapers and circulars in
wrappers lying on the table. One is a dingy book catalogue; the second
is a shiny pamphlet about petrol; the third is a paper called The
Christian Commonwealth. He opens it anyhow, and sees in the middle of a
page a sentence with which he honestly disagrees. It says that the sense
of beauty in Nature is a new thing, hardly felt before Wordsworth. A
stream of images and pictures pour through his head, like skies chasing
each other or forests running by. "Not felt before Wordsworth!" he
thinks. "Oh, but this won't do... bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang... night's candles are burnt out... glowed with living
sapphires... leaving their moon-loved maze... antique roots fantastic...
antique roots wreathed high... what is it in As You Like It?"
He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children
drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the
messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making
the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making
Shakespeare a present of a portion of Gray's Elegy; putting "fantastic
roots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out." Then the
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journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma
of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the
sister pinched him at Littlehampton. That is the first scene; that is
how an article is really written.
The scene now changes to the newspaper office. The writer of the article
has discovered his mistake and wants to correct it by the next day:
but the next day is Sunday. He cannot post a letter, so he rings up the
paper and dictates a letter by telephone. He leaves the title to his
friends at the other end; he knows that they can spell "Gray," as no
doubt they can: but the letter is put down by journalistic custom in a
pencil scribble and the vowel may well be doubtful. The friend writes
at the top of the letter "'G. K. C.' Explains," putting the initials in
quotation marks. The next man passing it for press is bored with these
initials (I am with him there) and crosses them out, substituting with
austere civility, "Mr. Chesterton Explains." But and now he hears
the iron laughter of the Fates, for the blind bolt is about to
fall—but he neglects to cross out the second "quote" (as we call
it) and it goes up to press with a "quote" between the last words.
Another quotation mark at the end of "explains" was the work of one
merry moment for the printers upstairs. So the inverted commas were
lifted entirely off one word on to the other and a totally innocent
title suddenly turned into a blasting sneer. But that would have
mattered nothing so far, for there was nothing to sneer at. In the same
dark hour, however, there was a printer who was (I suppose) so devoted
to this Government that he could think of no Gray but Sir Edward Grey.
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He spelt it "Grey" by a mere misprint, and the whole tale was complete:
first blunder, second blunder, and final condemnation.
That is a little tale of journalism as it is; if you call it egotistic
and ask what is the use of it I think I could tell you. You might
remember it when next some ordinary young workman is going to be hanged
by the neck on circumstantial evidence.
THE SENTIMENTAL SCOT
Of all the great nations of Christendom, the Scotch are by far the most
romantic. I have just enough Scotch experience and just enough Scotch
blood to know this in the only way in which a thing can really be known;
that is, when the outer world and the inner world are at one. I know it
is always said that the Scotch are practical, prosaic, and puritan; that
they have an eye to business. I like that phrase "an eye" to business.
Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his
forehead. It served him admirably for the only two duties which are
demanded in a modern financier and captain of industry: the two duties
of counting sheep and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out
he was done for. But the Scotch are not one-eyed practical men, though
their best friends must admit that they are occasionally business-like.
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They are, quite fundamentally, romantic and sentimental, and this
is proved by the very economic argument that is used to prove their
harshness and hunger for the material. The mass of Scots have accepted
the industrial civilisation, with its factory chimneys and its famine
prices, with its steam and smoke and steel—and strikes. The mass
of the Irish have not accepted it. The mass of the Irish have clung to
agriculture with claws of iron; and have succeeded in keeping it. That
is because the Irish, though far inferior to the Scotch in art and
literature, are hugely superior to them in practical politics. You do
need to be very romantic to accept the industrial civilisation. It does
really require all the old Gaelic glamour to make men think that Glasgow
is a grand place. Yet the miracle is achieved; and while I was in
Glasgow I shared the illusion. I have never had the faintest illusion
about Leeds or Birmingham. The industrial dream suited the Scots. Here
was a really romantic vista, suited to a romantic people; a vision of
higher and higher chimneys taking hold upon the heavens, of fiercer
and fiercer fires in which adamant could evaporate like dew. Here were
taller and taller engines that began already to shriek and gesticulate
like giants. Here were thunderbolts of communication which already
flashed to and fro like thoughts. It was unreasonable to expect the
rapt, dreamy, romantic Scot to stand still in such a whirl of wizardry
to ask whether he, the ordinary Scot, would be any the richer.
He, the ordinary Scot, is very much the poorer. Glasgow is not a rich
city. It is a particularly poor city ruled by a few particularly rich
men. It is not, perhaps, quite so poor a city as Liverpool, London,
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Manchester, Birmingham, or Bolton. It is vastly poorer than Rome, Rouen,
Munich, or Cologne. A certain civic vitality notable in Glasgow may,
perhaps, be due to the fact that the high poetic patriotism of the Scots
has there been reinforced by the cutting common sense and independence
of the Irish. In any case, I think there can be no doubt of the main
historical fact. The Scotch were tempted by the enormous but unequal
opportunities of industrialism, because the Scotch are romantic. The
Irish refused those enormous and unequal opportunities, because the
Irish are clear-sighted. They would not need very clear sight by this
time to see that in England and Scotland the temptation has been a
betrayal. The industrial system has failed.
I was coming the other day along a great valley road that strikes out of
the westland counties about Glasgow, more or less towards the east and
the widening of the Forth. It may, for all I know (I amused myself with
the fancy), be the way along which Wallace came with his crude army,
when he gave battle before Stirling Brig; and, in the midst of mediaeval
diplomacies, made a new nation possible. Anyhow, the romantic quality of
Scotland rolled all about me, as much in the last reek of Glasgow as in
the first rain upon the hills. The tall factory chimneys seemed trying
to be taller than the mountain peaks; as if this landscape were full
(as its history has been full) of the very madness of ambition. The
wageslavery we live in is a wicked thing. But there is nothing in which
the Scotch are more piercing and poetical, I might say more perfect,
than in their Scotch wickedness. It is what makes the Master of
Ballantrae the most thrilling of all fictitious villains. It is what
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makes the Master of Lovat the most thrilling of all historical villains.
It is poetry. It is an intensity which is on the edge of madness or
(what is worse) magic. Well, the Scotch have managed to apply something
of this fierce romanticism even to the lowest of all lordships and
serfdoms; the proletarian inequality of today. You do meet now and then,
in Scotland, the man you never meet anywhere else but in novels; I mean
the self-made man; the hard, insatiable man, merciless to himself as
well as to others. It is not "enterprise"; it is kleptomania. He is
quite mad, and a much more obvious public pest than any other kind of
kleptomaniac; but though he is a cheat, he is not an illusion. He does
exist; I have met quite two of him. Him alone among modern merchants
we do not weakly flatter when we call him a bandit. Something of the
irresponsibility of the true dark ages really clings about him. Our
scientific civilisation is not a civilisation; it is a smoke nuisance.
Like smoke it is choking us; like smoke it will pass away. Only of one
or two Scotsmen, in my experience, was it true that where there is smoke
there is fire.
But there are other kinds of fire; and better. The one great advantage
of this strange national temper is that, from the beginning of all
chronicles, it has provided resistance as well as cruelty. In Scotland
nearly everything has always been in revolt—especially loyalty.
If these people are capable of making Glasgow, they are also capable of
wrecking it; and the thought of my many good friends in that city makes
me really doubtful about which would figure in human memories as the
more huge calamity of the two. In Scotland there are many rich men so
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weak as to call themselves strong. But there are not so many poor men
weak enough to believe them.
As I came out of Glasgow I saw men standing about the road. They had
little lanterns tied to the fronts of their caps, like the fairies
who used to dance in the old fairy pantomimes. They were not, however,
strictly speaking, fairies. They might have been called gnomes, since
they worked in the chasms of those purple and chaotic hills. They worked
in the mines from whence comes the fuel of our fires. Just at the moment
when I saw them, moreover, they were not dancing; nor were they working.
They were doing nothing. Which, in my opinion (and I trust yours), was
the finest thing they could do.
THE SECTARIAN OF SOCIETY
A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are
and should be various, there must be some communication between them if
they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual
formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not
depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all start
with the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our
different visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees
the sun as a perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he is
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an impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The
colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to
live under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that
there is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle
(like a monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each is
shut up in the cell of a separate universe.
But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from
the denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does the
individual become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world
like a cloud; he causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed.
For what happens is this: that all the shortsighted people come together
and build a city called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness for
granted and paint short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted
policies. Meanwhile all the men who can stare at the sun get together on
Salisbury Plain and do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men who
see a blue moon band themselves together and assert the blue moon, not
once in a blue moon, but incessantly. So that instead of a small and
varied group, you have enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the
liberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste.
Allegory apart, instances of what I mean will occur to every one;
perhaps the most obvious is Socialism. Socialism means the ownership
by the organ of government (whatever it is) of all things necessary to
production. If a man claims to be a Socialist in that sense he can be
any kind of man he likes in any other sense—a bookie, a Mahatma,
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a man about town, an archbishop, a Margate nigger. Without recalling
at the moment clear-headed Socialists in all of these capacities, it
is obvious that a clear-headed Socialist (that is, a Socialist with a
creed) can be a soldier, like Mr. Blatchford, or a Don, like Mr. Ball,
or a Bathchairman like Mr. Meeke, or a clergyman like Mr. Conrad Noel,
or an artistic tradesman like the late Mr. William Morris.
But some people call themselves Socialists, and will not be bound by
what they call a narrow dogma; they say that Socialism means far, far
more than this; all that is high, all that is free, all that is, etc.,
etc. Now mark their dreadful fate; for they become totally unfit to be
tradesmen, or soldiers, or clergymen, or any other stricken human thing,
but become a particular sort of person who is always the same. When once
it has been discovered that Socialism does not mean a narrow economic
formula, it is also discovered that Socialism does mean wearing one
particular kind of clothes, reading one particular kind of books,
hanging up one particular kind of pictures, and in the majority of cases
even eating one particular kind of food. For men must recognise each
other somehow. These men will not know each other by a principle, like
fellow citizens. They cannot know each other by a smell, like dogs. So
they have to fall back on general colouring; on the fact that a man of
their sort will have a wife in pale green and Walter Crane's "Triumph of
Labour" hanging in the hall.
There are, of course, many other instances; for modern society is almost
made up of these large monochrome patches. Thus I, for one, regret
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the supersession of the old Puritan unity, founded on theology, but
embracing all types from Milton to the grocer, by that newer Puritan
unity which is founded rather on certain social habits, certain common
notions, both permissive and prohibitive, in connection with Particular
social pleasures.
Thus I, for one, regret that (if you are going to have an aristocracy)
it did not remain a logical one founded on the science of heraldry; a
thing asserting and defending the quite defensible theory that physical
genealogy is the test; instead of being, as it is now, a mere machine of
Eton and Oxford for varnishing anybody rich enough with one monotonous
varnish.
And it is supremely so in the case of religion. As long as you have a
creed, which every one in a certain group believes or is supposed to
believe, then that group will consist of the old recurring figures of
religious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it;
the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother. These people
do each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good,
with heavy and repeated blows. But once break the bond of doctrine which
alone holds these people together and each will gravitate to his own
kind outside the group. The hypocrites will all get together and
call each other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and call
themselves weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker
in a general atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go off
looking for somebody else with whom to brawl.
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This has very largely happened to modern English religion; I have been
in many churches, chapels, and halls where a confident pride in having
got beyond creeds was coupled with quite a paralysed incapacity to
get beyond catchwords. But wherever the falsity appears it comes from
neglect of the same truth: that men should agree on a principle, that
they may differ on everything else; that God gave men a law that they
might turn it into liberties.
There was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wife
and husband ought to have the same religion than there is in all the
contemporary gushing about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras of
identical colour. As a matter of fact, the more the sexes are in violent
contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more
incompatible their tempers are the better. Obviously a wife's soul
cannot possibly be a sister soul. It is very seldom so much as a first
cousin. There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament;
they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, to
think the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, to
think the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh at
it, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing
disgrace—this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage;
and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is by
affinities and auras. And what applies to the family applies to the
nation. A nation with a root religion will be tolerant. A nation with no
religion will be bigoted. Lastly, the worst effect of all is this:
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that when men come together to profess a creed, they come courageously,
though it is to hide in catacombs and caves. But when they come together
in a clique they come sneakishly, eschewing all change or disagreement,
though it is to dine to a brass band in a big London hotel. For birds of
a feather flock together, but birds of the white feather most of all.
THE FOOL
For many years I had sought him, and at last I found him in a club. I
had been told that he was everywhere; but I had almost begun to think
that he was nowhere. I had been assured that there were millions of him;
but before my late discovery I inclined to think that there were none of
him. After my late discovery I am sure that there is one; and I incline
to think that there are several, say, a few hundreds; but unfortunately
most of them occupying important positions. When I say "him," I mean the
entire idiot.
I have never been able to discover that "stupid public" of which so many
literary men complain. The people one actually meets in trains or at tea
parties seem to me quite bright and interesting; certainly quite enough
so to call for the full exertion of one's own wits. And even when I have
heard brilliant "conversationalists" conversing with other people, the
conversation had much more equality and give and take than this age of
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intellectual snobs will admit. I have sometimes felt tired, like other
people; but rather tired with men's talk and variety than with their
stolidity or sameness; therefore it was that I sometimes longed to find
the refreshment of a single fool.
But it was denied me. Turn where I would I found this monotonous
brilliancy of the general intelligence, this ruthless, ceaseless sparkle
of humour and good sense. The "mostly fools" theory has been used in an
anti-democratic sense; but when I found at last my priceless ass, I
did not find him in what is commonly called the democracy; nor in the
aristocracy either. The man of the democracy generally talks quite
rationally, sometimes on the anti-democratic side, but always with an
idea of giving reasons for what he says and referring to the realities
of his experience. Nor is it the aristocracy that is stupid; at least,
not that section of the aristocracy which represents it in politics.
They are often cynical, especially about money, but even their
boredom tends to make them a little eager for any real information or
originality. If a man like Mr. Winston Churchill or Mr. Wyndham made up
his mind for any reason to attack Syndicalism he would find out what it
was first. Not so the man I found in the club.
He was very well dressed; he had a heavy but handsome face; his black
clothes suggested the City and his gray moustaches the Army; but the
whole suggested that he did not really belong to either, but was one
of those who dabble in shares and who play at soldiers. There was some
third element about him that was neither mercantile nor military. His
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manners were a shade too gentlemanly to be quite those of a gentleman.
They involved an unction and over-emphasis of the club-man: then I
suddenly remembered feeling the same thing in some old actors or old
playgoers who had modelled themselves on actors. As I came in he said,
"If I was the Government," and then put a cigar in his mouth which he
lit carefully with long intakes of breath. Then he took the cigar out
of his mouth again and said, "I'd give it 'em," as if it were quite a
separate sentence. But even while his mouth was stopped with the cigar
his companion or interlocutor leaped to his feet and said with great
heartiness, snatching up a hat, "Well, I must be off. Tuesday!". I
dislike these dark suspicions, but I certainly fancied I recognised the
sudden geniality with which one takes leave of a bore.
When, therefore, he removed the narcotic stopper from his mouth it was
to me that he addressed the belated epigram. "I'd give it 'em."
"What would you give them," I asked, "the minimum wage?"
"I'd give them beans," he said. "I'd shoot 'em down shoot 'em down,
every man Jack of them. I lost my best train yesterday, and here's
the whole country paralysed, and here's a handful of obstinate fellows
standing between the country and coal. I'd shoot 'em down!"
"That would surely be a little harsh," I pleaded. "After all, they
are not under martial law, though I suppose two or three of them have
commissions in the Yeomanry."
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"Commissions in the Yeomanry!" he repeated, and his eyes and face, which
became startling and separate, like those of a boiled lobster, made me
feel sure that he had something of the kind himself.
"Besides," I continued, "wouldn't it be quite enough to confiscate their
money?"
"Well, I'd send them all to penal servitude, anyhow," he said, "and I'd
confiscate their funds as well."
"The policy is daring and full of difficulty," I replied, "but I do not
say that it is wholly outside the extreme rights of the republic. But
you must remember that though the facts of property have become
quite fantastic, yet the sentiment of property still exists. These
coal-owners, though they have not earned the mines, though they could
not work the mines, do quite honestly feel that they own the mines.
Hence your suggestion of shooting them down, or even of confiscating
their property, raises very—"
"What do you mean?" asked the man with the cigar, with a bullying eye.
"Who yer talking about?"
"I'm talking about what you were talking about," I replied; "as you put
it so perfectly, about the handful of obstinate fellows who are standing
between the country and the coal. I mean the men who are selling their
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own coal for fancy prices, and who, as long as they can get those
prices, care as little for national starvation as most merchant princes
and pirates have cared for the provinces that were wasted or the peoples
that were enslaved just before their ships came home. But though I am a
bit of a revolutionist myself, I cannot quite go with you in the extreme
violence you suggest. You say—"
"I say," he cried, bursting through my speech with a really splendid
energy like that of some noble beast, "I say I'd take all these blasted
miners and—"
I had risen slowly to my feet, for I was profoundly moved; and I stood
staring at that mental monster.
"Oh," I said, "so it is the miners who are all to be sent to penal
servitude, so that we may get more coal. It is the miners who are to be
shot dead, every man Jack of them; for if once they are all shot dead
they will start mining again...You must forgive me, sir; I know I seem
somewhat moved. The fact is, I have just found something. Something I
have been looking for for years."
"Well," he asked, with no unfriendly stare, "and what have you found?"
"No," I answered, shaking my head sadly, "I do not think it would be
quite kind to tell you what I have found."
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He had a hundred virtues, including the capital virtue of good humour,
and we had no difficulty in changing the subject and forgetting the
disagreement. He talked about society, his town friends and his country
sports, and I discovered in the course of it that he was a county
magistrate, a Member of Parliament, and a director of several important
companies. He was also that other thing, which I did not tell him.
The moral is that a certain sort of person does exist, to whose glory
this article is dedicated. He is not the ordinary man. He is not the
miner, who is sharp enough to ask for the necessities of existence. He
is not the mine-owner, who is sharp enough to get a great deal more, by
selling his coal at the best possible moment. He is not the aristocratic
politician, who has a cynical but a fair sympathy with both economic
opportunities. But he is the man who appears in scores of public places
open to the upper middle class or (that less known but more powerful
section) the lower upper class. Men like this all over the country are
really saying whatever comes into their heads in their capacities of
justice of the peace, candidate for Parliament, Colonel of the Yeomanry,
old family doctor, Poor Law guardian, coroner, or above all, arbiter in
trade disputes. He suffers, in the literal sense, from softening of the
brain; he has softened it by always taking the view of everything most
comfortable for his country, his class, and his private personality.
He is a deadly public danger. But as I have given him his name at the
beginning of this article there is no need for me to repeat it at the
end.
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THE CONSCRIPT AND THE CRISIS
Very few of us ever see the history of our own time happening. And
I think the best service a modern journalist can do to society is to
record as plainly as ever he can exactly what impression was produced on
his mind by anything he has actually seen and heard on the outskirts of
any modern problem or campaign. Though all he saw of a railway strike
was a flat meadow in Essex in which a train was becalmed for an hour or
two, he will probably throw more light on the strike by describing this
which he has seen than by describing the steely kings of commerce and
the bloody leaders of the mob whom he has never seen—nor any one
else either. If he comes a day too late for the battle of Waterloo (as
happened to a friend of my grandfather) he should still remember that a
true account of the day after Waterloo would be a most valuable thing to
have. Though he was on the wrong side of the door when Rizzio was being
murdered, we should still like to have the wrong side described in
the right way. Upon this principle I, who know nothing of diplomacy or
military arrangements, and have only held my breath like the rest of
the world while France and Germany were bargaining, will tell quite
truthfully of a small scene I saw, one of the thousand scenes that were,
so to speak, the anterooms of that inmost chamber of debate.
In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares
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of a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those gray
and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden,
like the solid blue-gray lead of the spires and the jewelled windows;
the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping
with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were
scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with
many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain.
I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the
announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there
would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft
of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town
and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful
moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways.
There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of
all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing
about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a
Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or
likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all the
time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it
were a sort of mystical inn.
Several tricolours were hung quite near to the altar, and the young men,
when they came in, filed up the church and sat right at the front.
They were, of course, of every imaginable social grade; for the French
conscription is really strict and universal. Some looked like young
criminals, some like young priests, some like both. Some were so
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obviously prosperous and polished that a barrack-room must seem to
them like hell; others (by the look of them) had hardly ever been in so
decent a place. But it was not so much the mere class variety that most
sharply caught an Englishman's eye. It was the presence of just those
one or two kinds of men who would never have become soldiers in any
other way.
There are many reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter of
hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; it
may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work.
But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never
tend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with red
hair, large ears, and very careful clothing, somehow conveyed across
the church that he had always taken care of his health, not even from
thinking about it, but simply because he was told, and that he was one
of those who pass from childhood to manhood without any shock of being a
man. In the row in front of him there was a very slight and vivid little
Jew, of the sort that is a tailor and a Socialist. By one of those
accidents that make real life so unlike anything else, he was the one
of the company who seemed especially devout. Behind these stiff or
sensitive boys were ranged the ranks of their mothers and fathers, with
knots and bunches of their little brothers and sisters.
The children kicked their little legs, wriggled about the seats, and
gaped at the arched roof while their mothers were on their knees praying
their own prayers, and here and there crying. The gray clouds of
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rain outside gathered, I suppose, more and more; for the deep church
continuously darkened. The lads in front began to sing a military hymn
in odd, rather strained voices; I could not disentangle the words, but
only one perpetual refrain; so that it sounded like
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la patrie,
Valdarkararump pour la patrie.
Then this ceased; and silence continued, the coloured windows growing
gloomier and gloomier with the clouds. In the dead stillness a child
started crying suddenly and incoherently. In a city far to the north a
French diplomatist and a German aristocrat were talking.
I will not make any commentary on the thing that could blur the outline
of its almost cruel actuality. I will not talk nor allow any one else to
talk about "clericalism" and "militarism." Those who talk like that are
made of the same mud as those who call all the angers of the unfortunate
"Socialism." The women who were calling in the gloom around me on God
and the Mother of God were not "clericalists"; or, if they were,
they had forgotten it. And I will bet my boots the young men were not
"militarists"—quite the other way just then. The priest made a
short speech; he did not utter any priestly dogmas (whatever they are),
he uttered platitudes. In such circumstances platitudes are the only
possible things to say; because they are true. He began by saying that
he supposed a large number of them would be uncommonly glad not to go.
They seemed to assent to this particular priestly dogma with even
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more than their alleged superstitious credulity. He said that war was
hateful, and that we all hated it; but that "in all things reasonable"
the law of one's own commonwealth was the voice of God. He spoke about
Joan of Arc; and how she had managed to be a bold and successful soldier
while still preserving her virtue and practising her religion; then he
gave them each a little paper book. To which they replied (after a brief
interval for reflection):
Pongprongperesklang pour la patrie,
Tambraugtararronc pour la patrie.
which I feel sure was the best and most pointed reply.
While all this was happening feelings quite indescribable crowded
about my own darkening brain, as the clouds crowded above the darkening
church. They were so entirely of the elements and the passions that I
cannot utter them in an idea, but only in an image. It seemed to me
that we were barricaded in this church, but we could not tell what was
happening outside the church. The monstrous and terrible jewels of the
windows darkened or glistened under moving shadow or light, but the
nature of that light and the shapes of those shadows we did not know and
hardly dared to guess. The dream began, I think, with a dim fancy that
enemies were already in the town, and that the enormous oaken doors were
groaning under their hammers. Then I seemed to suppose that the town
itself had been destroyed by fire, and effaced, as it may be thousands
of years hence, and that if I opened the door I should come out on a
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wilderness as flat and sterile as the sea. Then the vision behind the
veil of stone and slate grew wilder with earthquakes. I seemed to
see chasms cloven to the foundations of all things, and letting up an
infernal dawn. Huge things happily hidden from us had climbed out of
the abyss, and were striding about taller than the clouds. And when the
darkness crept from the sapphires of Mary to the sanguine garments of
St. John I fancied that some hideous giant was walking round the church
and looking in at each window in turn.
Sometimes, again, I thought of that church with coloured windows as a
ship carrying many lanterns struggling in a high sea at night. Sometimes
I thought of it as a great coloured lantern itself, hung on an iron
chain out of heaven and tossed and swung to and fro by strong wings, the
wings of the princes of the air. But I never thought of it or the young
men inside it save as something precious and in peril, or of the things
outside but as something barbaric and enormous.
I know there are some who cannot sympathise with such sentiments of
limitation; I know there are some who would feel no touch of the heroic
tenderness if some day a young man, with red hair, large ears, and
his mother's lozenges in his pocket, were found dead in uniform in the
passes of the Vosges. But on this subject I have heard many philosophies
and thought a good deal for myself; and the conclusion I have come to is
Sacrarterumbrrar pour la Pattie, and it is not likely that I shall alter
it now.
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But when I came out of the church there were none of these things,
but only a lot of Shops, including a paper-shop, on which the posters
announced that the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.
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THE MISER AND HIS FRIENDS
It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by
some special sort of lunatic. A mild touch of madness may even keep a
man sane; for it may keep him modest. So some exaggerations in the State
may remind it of its own normal. But it is bad when the head is cracked;
when the roof of the commonwealth has a tile loose.
The two or three cases of this that occur in history have always been
gibbeted gigantically. Thus Nero has become a black proverb, not
merely because he was an oppressor, but because he was also an
aesthete—that is, an erotomaniac. He not only tortured other
people's bodies; he tortured his own soul into the same red revolting
shapes. Though he came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was
followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman
Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The
populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when
they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of
the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw
a statue without a head.
It is the same with that ugly entanglement before the Renaissance, from
which, alas, most memories of the Middle Ages are derived. Louis XI
was a very patient and practical man of the world; but (like many
good business men) he was mad. The morbidity of the intriguer and the
torturer clung about everything he did, even when it was right. And just
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as the great Empire of Antoninus and Aurelius never wiped out Nero, so
even the silver splendour of the latter saints, such as Vincent de Paul,
has never painted out for the British public the crooked shadow of Louis
XI. Whenever the unhealthy man has been on top, he has left a horrible
savour that humanity finds still in its nostrils. Now in our time the
unhealthy man is on top; but he is not the man mad on sex, like Nero; or
mad on statecraft, like Louis XI; he is simply the man mad on money. Our
tyrant is not the satyr or the torturer; but the miser.
The modern miser has changed much from the miser of legend and anecdote;
but only because he has grown yet more insane. The old miser had
some touch of the human artist about him in so far that he collected
gold—a substance that can really be admired for itself, like ivory
or old oak. An old man who picked up yellow pieces had something of the
simple ardour, something of the mystical materialism, of a child who
picks out yellow flowers. Gold is but one kind of coloured clay, but
coloured clay can be very beautiful. The modern idolater of riches is
content with far less genuine things. The glitter of guineas is like
the glitter of buttercups, the chink of pelf is like the chime of bells,
compared with the dreary papers and dead calculations which make the
hobby of the modern miser.
The modern millionaire loves nothing so lovable as a coin. He is content
sometimes with the dead crackle of notes; but far more often with the
mere repetition of noughts in a ledger, all as like each other as eggs
to eggs. And as for comfort, the old miser could be comfortable, as many
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tramps and savages are, when he was once used to being unclean. A man
could find some comfort in an unswept attic or an unwashed shirt. But
the Yankee millionaire can find no comfort with five telephones at his
bed-head and ten minutes for his lunch. The round coins in the miser's
stocking were safe in some sense. The round noughts in the millionaire's
ledger are safe in no sense; the same fluctuation which excites him with
their increase depresses him with their diminution. The miser at least
collects coins; his hobby is numismatics. The man who collects noughts
collects nothings.
It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot;
but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. The
answer to this is very important and rather curious. The evil enigma
for us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction is
important; because this special problem is separate from the old general
quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strong
books, old and new. The special problem to-day is that certain powers
and privileges have grown so world-wide and unwieldy that they are out
of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately
poor. They are out of the power of everybody except a few
millionaires—that is, misers. In the old normal friction of normal
wealth and poverty I am myself on the Radical side. I think that a
Berkshire squire has too much power over his tenants; that a Brompton
builder has too much power over his workmen; that a West London doctor
has too much power over the poor patients in the West London Hospital.
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But a Berkshire squire has no power over cosmopolitan finance, for
instance. A Brompton builder has not money enough to run a Newspaper
Trust. A West End doctor could not make a corner in quinine and freeze
everybody out. The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern
market. The things that change modern history, the big national and
international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations,
the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages,
the big expenses often incurred in elections—these are getting too
big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly
fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.
There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about
them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the
chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser
aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even
good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are
sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their
patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to
sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous
man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will
never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old
bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough
to want it.
Lastly, the most serious point about them is this: that the new miser
is flattered for his meanness and the old one never was. It was never
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called self-denial in the old miser that he lived on bones. It is called
self-denial in the new millionaire if he lives on beans. A man like
Dancer was never praised as a Christian saint for going in rags. A
man like Rockefeller is praised as a sort of pagan stoic for his
early rising or his unassuming dress. His "simple" meals, his "simple"
clothes, his "simple" funeral, are all extolled as if they were
creditable to him. They are disgraceful to him: exactly as disgraceful
as the tatters and vermin of the old miser were disgraceful to him. To
be in rags for charity would be the condition of a saint; to be in rags
for money was that of a filthy old fool. Precisely in the same way,
to be "simple" for charity is the state of a saint; to be "simple" for
money is that of a filthy old fool. Of the two I have more respect for
the old miser, gnawing bones in an attic: if he was not nearer to God,
he was at least a little nearer to men. His simple life was a little
more like the life of the real poor.
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THE MYSTAGOGUE
Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and
impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable, then elevate your
aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay. It is
perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond
all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all
good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment;
and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is
always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are
that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.
Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically
that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint
Him. And they felt (very rightly) that representing Him as a rather
quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard, like a king of the
elves, was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him
in some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy
pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more
blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good
is always towards Incarnation. But, on the other hand, those refined
thinkers who worship the Devil, whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the
salons of Paris, always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness,
the unutterable character of the abomination. They call him "horror
of emptiness," as did the black witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter; they
worship him as the unspeakable name; as the unbearable silence. They
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think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind; the cloud on
the brain of the maniac; the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless
corridors of nightmare. It was the Christians who gave the Devil a
grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It
was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists
never drew him at all.
And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity
and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may
separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt
from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he
has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has
no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too
subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outree or
specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary
people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable
that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is
always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable;
but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to
come out of it.
Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the
thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious that
an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy
cunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious that
a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait
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painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much.
And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the
pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important
half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that
connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The
"Mona Lisa" was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her
to be. Leonardo's picture was, in some respects, like the lady. And
Walter Pater's rich description was, in some respects, like the picture.
Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the
last resort, can express something other than its own unhappy self.
Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely
inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being
speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good in
Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically
the critic's business to explain it: to translate it from terms of
painting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will be
inadequate—but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be the
first to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received can
at least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligent
cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the
Sea." Ruskin does suggest an intelligent motive for Turner destroying
forests and falsifying landscapes. These two great critics were far too
fastidious for my taste; they urged to excess the idea that a sense
of art was a sort of secret; to be patiently taught and slowly learnt.
Still, they thought it could be taught: they thought it could be learnt.
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They constrained themselves, with considerable creative fatigue, to find
the exact adjectives which might parallel in English prose what has been
clone in Italian painting. The same is true of Whistler and R. A. M.
Stevenson and many others in the exposition of Velasquez. They had
something to say about the pictures; they knew it was unworthy of the
pictures, but they said it.
Now the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post
Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They
are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt
to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is
untranslatable—that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable,
impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their
banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper
on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried
to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good
old anti-democratic muddlements: that "the public" does not understand
these things; that "the likes of us" cannot dare to question the dark
decisions of our lords.
I venture to suggest that we resist all this rubbish by the very simple
test mentioned above. If there were anything intelligent in such art,
something of it at least could be made intelligible in literature. Man
is made with one head, not with two or three. No criticism of Rembrandt
is as good as Rembrandt; but it can be so written as to make a man go
back and look at his pictures. If there is a curious and fantastic art,
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it is the business of the art critics to create a curious and fantastic
literary expression for it; inferior to it, doubtless, but still akin to
it. If they cannot do this, as they cannot; if there is nothing in their
eulogies, as there is nothing except eulogy—then they are quacks
or the high-priests of the unutterable. If the art critics can say
nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because
the artists are bad. They can explain nothing because they have found
nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be
found.
THE RED REACTIONARY
The one case for Revolution is that it is the only quite clean and
complete road to anything—even to restoration. Revolution alone
can be not merely a revolt of the living, but also a resurrection of the
dead.
A friend of mine (one, in fact, who writes prominently on this paper)
was once walking down the street in a town of Western France, situated
in that area that used to be called La Vendee; which in that great
creative crisis about 1790 formed a separate and mystical soul of its
own, and made a revolution against a revolution. As my friend went down
this street he whistled an old French air which he had found, like Mr.
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Gandish, "in his researches into 'istry," and which had somehow taken
his fancy; the song to which those last sincere loyalists went into
battle. I think the words ran:
Monsieur de Charette.
Dit au gens d'ici.
Le roi va remettre.
Le fleur de lys.
My friend was (and is) a Radical, but he was (and is) an Englishman, and
it never occurred to him that there could be any harm in singing archaic
lyrics out of remote centuries; that one had to be a Catholic to enjoy
the "Dies Irae," or a Protestant to remember "Lillibullero." Yet he was
stopped and gravely warned that things so politically provocative might
get him at least into temporary trouble.
A little time after I was helping King George V to get crowned, by
walking round a local bonfire and listening to a local band. Just as a
bonfire cannot be too big, so (by my theory of music) a band cannot
be too loud, and this band was so loud, emphatic, and obvious, that I
actually recognised one or two of the tunes. And I noticed that quite a
formidable proportion of them were Jacobite tunes; that is, tunes that
had been primarily meant to keep George V out of his throne for ever.
Some of the real airs of the old Scottish rebellion were played, such
as "Charlie is My Darling," or "What's a' the steer, kimmer?" songs that
men had sung while marching to destroy and drive out the monarchy under
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which we live. They were songs in which the very kinsmen of the present
King were swept aside as usurpers. They were songs in which the actual
words "King George" occurred as a curse and a derision. Yet they
were played to celebrate his very Coronation; played as promptly and
innocently as if they had been "Grandfather's Clock" or "Rule Britannia"
or "The Honeysuckle and the Bee."
That contrast is the measure, not only between two nations, but between
two modes of historical construction and development. For there is not
really very much difference, as European history goes, in the time that
has elapsed between us and the Jacobite and between us and the Jacobin.
When George III was crowned the gauntlet of the King's Champion was
picked up by a partisan of the Stuarts. When George III was still on the
throne the Bourbons were driven out of France as the Stuarts had been
driven out of England. Yet the French are just sufficiently aware that
the Bourbons might possibly return that they will take a little trouble
to discourage it; whereas we are so certain that the Stuarts will never
return that we actually play their most passionate tunes as a compliment
to their rivals. And we do not even do it tauntingly. I examined the
faces of all the bandsmen; and I am sure they were devoid of irony:
indeed, it is difficult to blow a wind instrument ironically. We do it
quite unconsciously; because we have a huge fundamental dogma, which the
French have not. We really believe that the past is past. It is a very
doubtful point.
Now the great gift of a revolution (as in France) is that it makes men
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free in the past as well as free in the future. Those who have cleared
away everything could, if they liked, put back everything. But we who
have preserved everything—we cannot restore anything. Take,
for the sake of argument, the complex and many coloured ritual of the
Coronation recently completed. That rite is stratified with the separate
centuries; from the first rude need of discipline to the last fine shade
of culture or corruption, there is nothing that cannot be detected or
even dated. The fierce and childish vow of the lords to serve their lord
"against all manner of folk" obviously comes from the real Dark Ages;
no longer confused, even by the ignorant, with the Middle Ages. It comes
from some chaos of Europe, when there was one old Roman road across four
of our counties; and when hostile "folk" might live in the next village.
The sacramental separation of one man to be the friend of the fatherless
and the nameless belongs to the true Middle Ages; with their great
attempt to make a moral and invisible Roman Empire; or (as the
Coronation Service says) to set the cross for ever above the ball.
Elaborate local tomfooleries, such as that by which the Lord of the
Manor of Work-sop is alone allowed to do something or other, these
probably belong to the decay of the Middle Ages, when that great
civilisation died out in grotesque literalism and entangled heraldry.
Things like the presentation of the Bible bear witness to the
intellectual outburst at the Reformation; things like the Declaration
against the Mass bear witness to the great wars of the Puritans; and
things like the allegiance of the Bishops bear witness to the wordy and
parenthetical political compromises which (to my deep regret) ended the
wars of religion.
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But my purpose here is only to point out one particular thing. In all
that long list of variations there must be, and there are, things
which energetic modern minds would really wish, with the reasonable
modification, to restore. Dr. Clifford would probably be glad to see
again the great Puritan idealism that forced the Bible into an antique
and almost frozen formality. Dr. Horton probably really regrets the
old passion that excommunicated Rome. In the same way Mr. Belloc
would really prefer the Middle Ages; as Lord Rosebery would prefer
the Erastian oligarchy of the eighteenth century. The Dark Ages would
probably be disputed (from widely different motives) by Mr. Rudyard
Kipling and Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Mr. Cunninghame Graham would
win.
But the black case against Conservative (or Evolutionary) politics is
that none of these sincere men can win. Dr. Clifford cannot get back
to the Puritans; Mr. Belloc cannot get back to the mediaevals; because
(alas) there has been no Revolution to leave them a clear space for
building or rebuilding. Frenchmen have all the ages behind them, and can
wander back and pick and choose. But Englishmen have all the ages on top
of them, and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower, without
being able to take so much as a brick out of it. If the French decide
that their Republic is bad they can get rid of it; but if we decide that
a Republic was good, we should have much more difficulty. If the French
democracy actually desired every detail of the mediaeval monarchy, they
could have it. I do not think they will or should, but they could. If
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another Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arc
actually bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediaeval swords shook
and blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from every
tapestry; if this were really proved to be the will of France and the
purpose of Providence—such a scene would still be the lasting and
final justification of the French Revolution.
For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI.
THE SEPARATIST AND SACRED THINGS
In the very laudable and fascinating extensions of our interest in
Asiatic arts or faiths, there are two incidental injustices which we
tend nowadays to do to our own records and our own religion. The first
is a tendency to talk as if certain things were not only present in the
higher Orientals, but were peculiar to them. Thus our magazines will
fall into a habit of wondering praise of Bushido, the Japanese chivalry,
as if no Western knights had ever vowed noble vows, or as if no Eastern
knights had ever broken them. Or again, our drawing-rooms will be full
of the praises of Indian renunciation and Indian unworldliness, as if no
Christians had been saints, or as if all Buddhists had been. But if the
first injustice is to think of human virtues as peculiarly Eastern, the
other injustice is a failure to appreciate what really is peculiarly
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Eastern. It is too much taken for granted that the Eastern sort of
idealism is certainly superior and convincing; whereas in truth it is
only separate and peculiar. All that is richest, deepest, and subtlest
in the East is rooted in Pantheism; but all that is richest, deepest,
and subtlest in us is concerned with denying passionately that Pantheism
is either the highest or the purest religion.
Thus, in turning over some excellent books recently written on the
spirit of Indian or Chinese art and decoration, I found it quietly and
curiously assumed that the artist must be at his best if he flows with
the full stream of Nature; and identifies himself with all things; so
that the stars are his sleepless eyes and the forests his far-flung
arms. Now in this way of talking both the two injustices will be found.
In so far as what is claimed is a strong sense of the divine in all
things, the Eastern artists have no more monopoly of it than they have
of hunger and thirst.
I have no doubt that the painters and poets of the Far East do exhibit
this; but I rebel at being asked to admit that we must go to the Far
East to find it. Traces of such sentiments can be found, I fancy, even
in other painters and poets. I do not question that the poet Wo Wo (that
ornament of the eighth dynasty) may have written the words: "Even the
most undignified vegetable is for this person capable of producing
meditations not to be exhibited by much weeping." But, I do not
therefore admit that a Western gentleman named Wordsworth (who made
a somewhat similar remark) had plagiarised from Wo Wo, or was a mere
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Occidental fable and travesty of that celebrated figure. I do not deny
that Tinishona wrote that exquisite example of the short Japanese poem
entitled "Honourable Chrysanthemum in Honourable Hole in Wall." But I do
not therefore admit that Tennyson's little verse about the flower in the
cranny was not original and even sincere.
It is recorded (for all I know) of the philanthropic Emperor Bo, that
when engaged in cutting his garden lawn with a mower made of alabaster
and chrysoberyl, he chanced to cut down a small flower; whereupon, being
much affected, he commanded his wise men immediately to take down upon
tablets of ivory the lines beginning: "Small and unobtrusive blossom
with ruby extremities." But this incident, touching as it is, does not
shake my belief in the incident of Robert Burns and the daisy; and I am
left with an impression that poets are pretty much the same everywhere
in their poetry—and in their prose.
I have tried to convey my sympathy and admiration for Eastern art and
its admirers, and if I have not conveyed them I must give it up and go
on to more general considerations. I therefore proceed to say—with
the utmost respect, that it is Cheek, a rarefied and etherealised form
of Cheek, for this school to speak in this way about the mother that
bore them, the great civilisation of the West. The West also has its
magic landscapes, only through our incurable materialism they look
like landscapes as well as like magic. The West also has its symbolic
figures, only they look like men as well as symbols. It will be answered
(and most justly) that Oriental art ought to be free to follow its own
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instinct and tradition; that its artists are concerned to suggest one
thing and our artists another; that both should be admired in their
difference. Profoundly true; but what is the difference? It is certainly
not as the Orientalisers assert, that we must go to the Far East for a
sympathetic and transcendental interpretation of Nature. We have paid
a long enough toll of mystics and even of madmen to be quit of that
disability.
Yet there is a difference, and it is just what I suggested. The Eastern
mysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy
of creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise. The latter says,
like St. Francis, "My brother fire and my sister water"; the former
says, "Myself fire and myself water." Whether you call the Eastern
attitude an extension of oneself into everything or a contraction of
oneself into nothing is a matter of metaphysical definition. The
effect is the same, an effect which lives and throbs throughout all the
exquisite arts of the East. This effect is the Sing called rhythm, a
pulsation of pattern, or of ritual, or of colours, or of cosmic theory,
but always suggesting the unification of the individual with the world.
But there is quite another kind of sympathy the sympathy with a
thing because it is different. No one will say that Rembrandt did not
sympathise with an old woman; but no one will say that Rembrandt painted
like an old woman. No one will say that Reynolds did not appreciate
children; but no one will say he did it childishly. The supreme instance
of this divine division is sex, and that explains (what I could never
understand in my youth) why Christendom called the soul the bride of
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God. For real love is an intense realisation of the "separateness" of
all our souls. The most heroic and human love-poetry of the world is
never mere passion; precisely because mere passion really is a melting
back into Nature, a meeting of the waters. And water is plunging
and powerful; but it is only powerful downhill. The high and human
love-poetry is all about division rather than identity; and in the great
love-poems even the man as he embraces the woman sees her, in the same
instant, afar off; a virgin and a stranger.
For the first injustice, of which we have spoken, still recurs; and if
we grant that the East has a right to its difference, it is not realised
in what we differ. That nursery tale from nowhere about St. George and
the Dragon really expresses best the relation between the West and the
East. There were many other differences, calculated to arrest even
the superficial eye, between a saint and a dragon. But the essential
difference was simply this: that the Dragon did want to eat St. George;
whereas St. George would have felt a strong distaste for eating the
Dragon. In most of the stories he killed the Dragon. In many of the
stories he not only spared, but baptised it. But in neither case did the
Christian have any appetite for cold dragon. The Dragon, however,
really has an appetite for cold Christian—and especially for cold
Christianity. This blind intention to absorb, to change the shape of
everything and digest it in the darkness of a dragon's stomach; this is
what is really meant by the Pantheism and Cosmic Unity of the East. The
Cosmos as such is cannibal; as old Time ate his children. The Eastern
saints were saints because they wanted to be swallowed up. The Western
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saint, like St. George, was sainted by the Western Church precisely
because he refused to be swallowed. The same process of thought that has
prevented nationalities disappearing in Christendom has prevented the
complete appearance of Pantheism. All Christian men instinctively resist
the idea of being absorbed into an Empire; an Austrian, a Spanish, a
British, or a Turkish Empire. But there is one empire, much larger and
much more tyrannical, which free men will resist with even stronger
passion. The free man violently resists being absorbed into the empire
which is called the Universe. He demands Home Rule for his nationality,
but still more Home Rule for his home. Most of all he demands Home
Rule for himself. He claims the right to be saved, in spite of Moslem
fatalism. He claims the right to be damned in spite of theosophical
optimism. He refuses to be the Cosmos; because he refuses to forget it.
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THE MUMMER
The night before Christmas Eve I heard a burst of musical voices so
close that they might as well have been inside the house instead of
just outside; so I asked them inside, hoping that they might then seem
farther away. Then I realised that they were the Christmas Mummers, who
come every year in country parts to enact the rather rigid fragments of
the old Christmas play of St. George, the Turkish Knight, and the Very
Venal Doctor. I will not describe it; it is indescribable; but I will
describe my parallel sentiments as it passed.
One could see something of that half-failure that haunts our artistic
revivals of mediaeval dances, carols, or Bethlehem Plays. There are
elements in all that has come to us from the more morally simple
society of the Middle Ages: elements which moderns, even when they are
mediaevalists, find it hard to understand and harder to imitate. The
first is the primary idea of Mummery itself. If you will observe a child
just able to walk, you will see that his first idea is not to dress up
as anybody—but to dress up. Afterwards, of course, the idea
of being the King or Uncle William will leap to his lips. But it is
generally suggested by the hat he has already let fall over his nose,
from far deeper motives. Tommy does not assume the hat primarily because
it is Uncle William's hat, but because it is not Tommy's hat. It is a
ritual investiture; and is akin to those Gorgon masks that stiffened the
dances of Greece or those towering mitres that came from the mysteries
of Persia. For the essence of such ritual is a profound paradox: the
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concealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of the
person. The man performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible and
conspicuous. It is part of that divine madness which all other creatures
wonder at in Man, that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration and
anonymity. Man is not, perhaps, the only creature who dresses himself,
but he is the only creature who disguises himself. Beasts and birds do
indeed take the colours of their environment; but that is not in order
to be watched, but in order not to be watched; it is not the formalism
of rejoicing, but the formlessness of fear. It is not so with men, whose
nature is the unnatural. Ancient Britons did not stain themselves blue
because they lived in blue forests; nor did Georgian beaux and belles
powder their hair to match an Arctic landscape; the Britons were not
dressing up as kingfishers nor the beaux pretending to be polar bears.
Nay, even when modern ladies paint their faces a bright mauve, it is
doubted by some naturalists whether they do it with the idea of escaping
notice. So merry-makers (or Mummers) adopt their costume to heighten
and exaggerate their own bodily presence and identity; not to sink it,
primarily speaking, in another identity. It is not Acting—that
comparatively low profession-comparatively I mean. It is Mummery;
and, as Mr. Kensit would truly say, all elaborate religious ritual is
Mummery. That is, it is the noble conception of making Man something
other and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human things.
It is only careful faddists and feeble German philosophers who want to
wear no clothes; and be "natural" in their Dionysian revels. Natural
men, really vigorous and exultant men, want to wear more and more
clothes when they are revelling. They want worlds of waistcoats and
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forests of trousers and pagodas of tall hats toppling up to the stars.
Thus it is with the lingering Mummers at Christmas in the country. If
our more refined revivers of Miracle Plays or Morrice Dances tried to
reconstruct the old Mummers' Play of St. George and the Turkish Knight
(I do not know why they do not) they would think at once of picturesque
and appropriate dresses. St. George's panoply would be pictured from
the best books of armour and blazonry: the Turkish Knight's arms and
ornaments would be traced from the finest Saracenic arabesques. When my
garden door opened on Christmas Eve and St. George of England entered,
the appearance of that champion was slightly different. His face was
energetically blacked all over with soot, above which he wore an
aged and very tall top hat; he wore his shirt outside his coat like a
surplice, and he flourished a thick umbrella. Now do not, I beg you,
talk about "ignorance"; or suppose that the Mummer in question (he is a
very pleasant Ratcatcher, with a tenor voice) did this because he knew
no better. Try to realise that even a Ratcatcher knows St. George of
England was not black, and did not kill the Dragon with an umbrella.
The Rat-catcher is not under this delusion; any more than Paul Veronese
thought that very good men have luminous rings round their heads; any
more than the Pope thinks that Christ washed the feet of the twelve in
a Cathedral; any more than the Duke of Norfolk thinks the lions on a
tabard are like the lions at the Zoo. These things are denaturalised
because they are symbols; because the extraordinary occasion must hide
or even disfigure the ordinary people. Black faces were to mediaeval
mummeries what carved masks were to Greek plays: it was called being
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"vizarded." My Rat-catcher is not sufficiently arrogant to suppose for
a moment that he looks like St. George. But he is sufficiently humble to
be convinced that if he looks as little like himself as he can, he will
be on the right road.
This is the soul of Mumming; the ostentatious secrecy of men in
disguise. There are, of course, other mediaeval elements in it which
are also difficult to explain to the fastidious mediaevalists of to-day.
There is, for instance, a certain output of violence into the void. It
can best be defined as a raging thirst to knock men down without the
faintest desire to hurt them. All the rhymes with the old ring have the
trick of turning on everything in which the rhymsters most sincerely
believed, merely for the pleasure of blowing off steam in startling
yet careless phrases. When Tennyson says that King Arthur "drew all the
petty princedoms under him," and "made a realm and ruled," his grave
Royalism is quite modern. Many mediaevals, outside the mediaeval
republics, believed in monarchy as solemnly as Tennyson. But that older
verse
When good King Arthur ruled this land
He was a goodly King—
He stole three pecks of barley-meal
To make a bag-pudding.
is far more Arthurian than anything in The Idylls of the King. There are
other elements; especially that sacred thing that can perhaps be called
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Anachronism. All that to us is Anachronism was to mediaevals merely
Eternity. But the main excellence of the Mumming Play lies still,
I think, in its uproarious secrecy. If we cannot hide our hearts in
healthy darkness, at least we can hide our faces in healthy blacking.
If you cannot escape like a philosopher into a forest, at least you can
carry the forest with you, like a Jack-in-the-Green. It is well to walk
under universal ensigns; and there is an old tale of a tyrant to whom
a walking forest was the witness of doom. That, indeed, is the very
intensity of the notion: a masked man is ominous; but who shall face a
mob of masks?
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THE ARISTOCRATIC 'ARRY
The Cheap Tripper, pursued by the curses of the aesthetes and the
antiquaries, really is, I suppose, a symptom of the strange and almost
unearthly ugliness of our diseased society. The costumes and customs
of a hundred peasantries are there to prove that such ugliness does
not necessarily follow from mere poverty, or mere democracy, or mere
unlettered simplicity of mind.
But though the tripper, artistically considered, is a sign of our
decadence, he is not one of its worst signs, but relatively one of its
best; one of its most innocent and most sincere. Compared with many
of the philosophers and artists who denounce him; he looks like a God
fearing fisher or a noble mountaineer. His antics with donkeys and
concertinas, crowded charabancs, and exchanged hats, though clumsy, are
not so vicious or even so fundamentally vulgar as many of the amusements
of the overeducated. People are not more crowded on a char-a-banc than
they are at a political "At Home," or even an artistic soiree; and if
the female trippers are overdressed, at least they are not overdressed
and underdressed at the same time. It is better to ride a donkey than to
be a donkey. It is better to deal with the Cockney festival which asks
men and women to change hats, rather than with the modern Utopia that
wants them to change heads.
But the truth is that such small, but real, element of vulgarity as
there is indeed in the tripper, is part of a certain folly and falsity
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which is characteristic of much modernity, and especially of the very
people who persecute the poor tripper most. There is something in the
whole society, and even especially in the cultured part of it, that does
things in a clumsy and unbeautiful way.
A case occurs to me in the matter of Stonehenge, which I happened to
visit yesterday. Now to a person really capable of feeling the poetry of
Stonehenge it is almost a secondary matter whether he sees Stonehenge
at all. The vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the gray
tablelands like primeval altars, the trailing rain-clouds, the vapour
of primeval sacrifices, would all tell him of a very ancient and
very lonely Britain. It would not spoil his Druidic mood if he
missed Stonehenge. But it does spoil his mood to find
Stonehenge—surrounded by a brand-new fence of barbed wire, with a
policeman and a little shop selling picture post-cards.
Now if you protest against this, educated people will instantly answer
you, "Oh, it was done to prevent the vulgar trippers who chip stones and
carve names and spoil the look of Stonehenge." It does not seem to
occur to them that barbed wire and a policeman rather spoil the look of
Stonehenge. The scratching of a name, particularly when performed
with blunt penknife or pencil by a person of imperfect School Board
education, can be trusted in a little while to be indistinguishable from
the grayest hieroglyphic by the grandest Druid of old. But nobody could
get a modern policeman into the same picture with a Druid. This really
vital piece of vandalism was done by the educated, not the uneducated;
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it was done by the influence of the artists or antiquaries who wanted
to preserve the antique beauty of Stonehenge. It seems to me curious to
preserve your lady's beauty from freckles by blacking her face all over;
or to protect the pure whiteness of your wedding garment by dyeing it
green.
And if you ask, "But what else could any one have done, what could the
most artistic age have done to save the monument?" I reply, "There are
hundreds of things that Greeks or Mediaevals might have done; and I have
no notion what they would have chosen; but I say that by an instinct in
their whole society they would have done something that was decent and
serious and suitable to the place. Perhaps some family of knights or
warriors would have the hereditary duty of guarding such a place. If so
their armour would be appropriate; their tents would be appropriate;
not deliberately—they would grow like that. Perhaps some religious
order such as normally employ nocturnal watches and the relieving of
guard would protect such a place. Perhaps it would be protected by all
sorts of rituals, consecrations, or curses, which would seem to you
mere raving superstition and silliness. But they do not seem to me one
twentieth part so silly, from a purely rationalist point of view, as
calmly making a spot hideous in order to keep it beautiful."
The thing that is really vulgar, the thing that is really vile, is to
live in a good place Without living by its life. Any one who settles
down in a place without becoming part of it is (barring peculiar
personal cases, of course) a tripper or wandering cad. For instance,
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the Jew is a genuine peculiar case. The Wandering Jew is not a wandering
cad. He is a highly civilised man in a highly difficult position; the
world being divided, and his own nation being divided, about whether he
can do anything else except wander.
The best example of the cultured, but common, tripper is the educated
Englishman on the Continent. We can no longer explain the quarrel by
calling Englishmen rude and foreigners polite. Hundreds of Englishmen
are extremely polite, and thousands of foreigners are extremely rude.
The truth of the matter is that foreigners do not resent the rude
Englishman. What they do resent, what they do most justly resent, is
the polite Englishman. He visits Italy for Botticellis or Flanders
for Rembrandts, and he treats the great nations that made these things
courteously—as he would treat the custodians of any museum. It
does not seem to strike him that the Italian is not the custodian of the
pictures, but the creator of them. He can afford to look down on such
nations—when he can paint such pictures.
That is, in matters of art and travel, the psychology of the cad.
If, living in Italy, you admire Italian art while distrusting Italian
character, you are a tourist, or cad. If, living in Italy, you admire
Italian art while despising Italian religion, you are a tourist, or cad.
It does not matter how many years you have lived there. Tourists will
often live a long time in hotels without discovering the nationality
of the waiters. Englishmen will often live a long time in Italy without
discovering the nationality of the Italians. But the test is simple. If
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you admire what Italians did without admiring Italians—you are a
cheap tripper.
The same, of course, applies much nearer home. I have remarked elsewhere
that country shopkeepers are justly offended by London people, who,
coming among them, continue to order all their goods from London. It is
caddish to wink and squint at the colour of a man's wine, like a wine
taster; and then refuse to drink it. It is equally caddish to wink and
squint at the colour of a man's orchard, like a landscape painter; and
then refuse to buy the apples. It is always an insult to admire a thing
and not use it. But the main point is that one has no right to see
Stonehenge without Salisbury Plain and Salisbury: One has no right to
respect the dead Italians without respecting the live ones. One has no
right to visit a Christian society like a diver visiting the deep-sea
fishes—fed along a lengthy tube by another atmosphere, and seeing
the sights without breathing the air. It is very real bad manners.
136
THE NEW THEOLOGIAN
It is an old story that names do not fit things; it is an old story
that the oldest forest is called the New Forest, and that Irish stew is
almost peculiar to England. But these are traditional titles that tend,
of their nature, to stiffen; it is the tragedy of to-day that even
phrases invented for to-day do not fit it. The forest has remained new
while it is nearly a thousand years old; but our fashions have grown old
while they were still new.
The extreme example of this is that when modern wrongs are attacked,
they are almost always attacked wrongly. People seem to have a positive
inspiration for finding the inappropriate phrase to apply to an
offender; they are always accusing a man of theft when he has been
convicted of murder. They must accuse Sir Edward Carson of outrageous
rebellion, when his offence has really been a sleek submission to
the powers that be. They must describe Mr. Lloyd George as using his
eloquence to rouse the mob, whereas he has really shown considerable
cleverness in damping it down. It was probably under the same impulse
towards a mysterious misfit of names that people denounced Dr. Inge as
"the Gloomy Dean."
Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a Dean; nor is there
anything wrong about being gloomy. The only question is what dark but
sincere motives have made you gloomy. What dark but sincere motives
have made you a Dean. Now the address of Dr. Inge which gained him
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this erroneous title was mostly concerned with a defence of the modern
capitalists against the modern strikers, from whose protest he appeared
to anticipate appalling results. Now if we look at the facts about that
gentleman's depression and also about his Deanery, we shall find a very
curious state of things.
When Dr. Inge was called "the Gloomy Dean" a great injustice was done
him. He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against
the forces of revolt; and any one who does that exceeds in optimism
rather than pessimism. A man who really thinks that strikers have
suffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong—such a man
is not a Gloomy Dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean. A
man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man with
a mysterious fountain of high spirits. And the actual occasion is not
less curious; because, as far as I can make out, his title to gloom
reposes on his having said that our worker's demand high wages, while
the placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less.
This is true enough, of course, and there does not seem to be much
difficulty about the matter. Men of the Far East will submit to very low
wages for the same reason that they will submit to "the punishment known
as Li, or Slicing"; for the same reason that they will praise polygamy
and suicide; for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to
the husband or his parents; for the same reason that they serve their
temples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that they
sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual
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perversion. They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men with
traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the
gestures of self-respect. They may be very much better than we are in
hundreds of other ways; and I can quite understand a man (though
hardly a Dean) really preferring their historic virtues to those of
Christendom. A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiatic
coolies than among his European comrades: and as we are to allow the
Broadest Thought in the Church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresy
as anybody else. It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberless
Orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money; and
it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and
prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as
possible for it.
But I cannot make out why, with his enthusiasm for heathen habits and
traditions, the Dean should wish to spread in the East the ideas which
he has found so dreadfully unsettling in the West. If some thousands of
years of paganism have produced the patience and industry that Dean Inge
admires, and if some thousand years of Christianity have produced
the sentimentality and sensationalism which he regrets, the obvious
deduction is that Dean Inge would be much happier if he were a heathen
Chinese. Instead of supporting Christian missions to Korea or Japan, he
ought to be at the head of a great mission in London for converting the
English to Taoism or Buddhism. There his passion for the moral beauties
of paganism would have free and natural play; his style would improve;
his mind would begin slowly to clear; and he would be free from all
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sorts of little irritating scrupulosities which must hamper even the
most Conservative Christian in his full praise of sweating and the sack.
In Christendom he will never find rest. The perpetual public criticism
and public change which is the note of all our history springs from a
certain spirit far too deep to be defined. It is deeper than democracy;
nay, it may often appear to be non-democratic; for it may often be the
special defence of a minority or an individual. It will often leave the
ninety-and-nine in the wilderness and go after that which is lost. It
will often risk the State itself to right a single wrong; and do justice
though the heavens fall. Its highest expression is not even in the
formula of the great gentlemen of the French Revolution who said that
all men were free and equal. Its highest expression is rather in the
formula of the peasant who said that a man's a man for a' that. If there
were but one slave in England, and he did all the work while the rest
of us made merry, this spirit that is in us would still cry aloud to
God night and day. Whether or no this spirit was produced by, it clearly
works with, a creed which postulates a humanised God and a vividly
personal immortality. Men must not be busy merely like a swarm, or even
happy merely like a herd; for it is not a question of men, but of a
man. A man's meals may be poor, but they must not be bestial; there must
always be that about the meal which permits of its comparison to
the sacrament. A man's bed may be hard, but it must not be abject or
unclean: there must always be about the bed something of the decency of
the death-bed.
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This is the spirit which makes the Christian poor begin their terrible
murmur whenever there is a turn of prices or a deadlock of toil
that threatens them with vagabondage or pauperisation; and we cannot
encourage the Dean with any hope that this spirit can be cast out.
Christendom will continue to suffer all the disadvantages of being
Christian: it is the Dean who must be gently but firmly altered. He had
absent-mindedly strayed into the wrong continent and the wrong creed. I
advise him to chuck it.
But the case is more curious still. To connect the Dean with Confucian
temples or traditions may have appeared fantastic; but it is not. Dr.
Inge is not a stupid old Tory Rector, strict both on Church and State.
Such a man might talk nonsense about the Christian Socialists being
"court chaplains of King Demos" or about his own superb valour in
defying the democracy that rages in the front pews of Anglican churches.
We should not expect a mere old-fashioned country clergyman to know that
Demos has never been king in England and precious seldom anywhere else;
we should not expect him to realise that if King Demos had any chaplains
they would be uncommonly poorly paid. But Dr. Inge is not old-fashioned;
he considers himself highly progressive and advanced. He is a New
Theologian; that is, he is liberal in theology—and nothing else.
He is apparently in sober fact, and not as in any fantasy, in sympathy
with those who would soften the superior claim of our creed by urging
the rival creeds of the East; with those who would absorb the virtues of
Buddhism or of Islam. He holds a high seat in that modern Parliament of
Religions where all believers respect each other's unbelief.
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Now this has a very sharp moral for modern religious reformers. When
next you hear the "liberal" Christian say that we should take what is
best in Oriental faiths, make quite sure what are the things that people
like Dr. Inge call best; what are the things that people like Dr. Inge
propose to take. You will not find them imitating the military valour of
the Moslem. You will not find them imitating the miraculous ecstasy of
the Hindoo. The more you study the "broad" movement of today, the more
you will find that these people want something much less like Chinese
metaphysics, and something much more like Chinese Labour. You will find
the levelling of creeds quite unexpectedly close to the lowering of
wages. Dr. Inge is the typical latitudinarian of to-day; and was never
more so than when he appeared not as the apostle of the blacks, but as
the apostle of the blacklegs. Preached, as it is, almost entirely
among the prosperous and polite, our brotherhood with Buddhism or
Mohammedanism practically means this—that the poor must be as meek
as Buddhists, while the rich may be as ruthless as Mohammedans. That is
what they call the reunion of all religions.
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THE ROMANTIC IN THE RAIN
The middle classes of modern England are quite fanatically fond of
washing; and are often enthusiastic for teetotalism. I cannot therefore
comprehend why it is that they exhibit a mysterious dislike of rain.
Rain, that inspiring and delightful thing, surely combines the qualities
of these two ideals with quite a curious perfection. Our philanthropists
are eager to establish public baths everywhere. Rain surely is a public
bath; it might almost be called mixed bathing. The appearance of persons
coming fresh from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished
or dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when
coming out of a bath. But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an
enormous purification. It realises the dream of some insane hygienist:
it scrubs the sky. Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry
rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic spring
cleaning.
If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble
at the English climate for being a cold bath. In these days we are
constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and
join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social
machinery. I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution. It
disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman
to take his shower-bath in private. It is a better shower-bath, because
it is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pulls
the string.
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As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact the
neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water
drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and
debauch of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginative
intoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret
or the golden clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some such
scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne
falls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with
the terrible colours of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, as
he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven,
and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, who
ought to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are
drinking water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: the
trees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs
as revellers clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health of
the world.
All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makes
a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I count
it Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I
complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all
living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every
weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said,
their need is greater than mine—especially for water.
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There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild
Highland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an
incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel
a tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he
puts on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying all
umbrella; it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads of
despots in the dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable
walking stick; open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have no
taste for pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of my
hat, and precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against
wet, it must be by some closer and more careless protection, something
that I can forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be
that yet more Highland thing, a mackintosh.
And there is really something in the mackintosh of the military
qualities of the Highlander. The proper cheap mackintosh has a blue and
white sheen as of steel or iron; it gleams like armour. I like to think
of it as the uniform of that ancient clan in some of its old and misty
raids. I like to think of all the Macintoshes, in their mackintoshes,
descending on some doomed Lowland village, their wet waterproofs
flashing in the sun or moon. For indeed this is one of the real beauties
of rainy weather, that while the amount of original and direct light
is commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light is
unquestionably increased. There is less sunshine; but there are more
shiny things; such beautifully shiny things as pools and puddles and
mackintoshes. It is like moving in a world of mirrors.
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And indeed this is the last and not the least gracious of the casual
works of magic wrought by rain: that while it decreases light, yet it
doubles it. If it dims the sky, it brightens the earth. It gives the
roads (to the sympathetic eye) something of the beauty of Venice.
Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; we
dwell in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous
pavements, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all
that golden looking-glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellow
sky. But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle,
the sense of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet,
dazzling confusion of shape and shadow, of reality and reflection, will
appeal strongly to any one with the transcendental instinct about this
dreamy and dual life of ours. It will always give a man the strange
sense of looking down at the skies.
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THE FALSE PHOTOGRAPHER
When, as lately, events have happened that seem (to the fancy, at least)
to test if not stagger the force of official government, it is
amusing to ask oneself what is the real weakness of civilisation, ours
especially, when it contends with the one lawless man. I was reminded of
one weakness this morning in turning over an old drawerful of pictures.
This weakness in civilisation is best expressed by saying that it cares
more for science than for truth. It prides itself on its "methods"
more than its results; it is satisfied with precision, discipline, good
communications, rather than with the sense of reality. But there are
precise falsehoods as well as precise facts. Discipline may only mean
a hundred men making the same mistake at the same minute. And good
communications may in practice be very like those evil communications
which are said to corrupt good manners. Broadly, we have reached a
"scientific age," which wants to know whether the train is in the
timetable, but not whether the train is in the station. I take one
instance in our police inquiries that I happen to have come across: the
case of photography.
Some years ago a poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared,
and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so
that he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted
or suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head
thrown back, with long distinguished features, colourless thin hair and
147
slight moustache, and though conveyed merely by the head and shoulders,
a definite impression of height. If I had gone by that photograph I
should have gone about looking for a long soldierly but listless man,
with a profile rather like the Duke of Connaught's.
Only, as it happened, I knew the poet personally; I had seen him a great
many times, and he had an appearance that nobody could possibly forget,
if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland
Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and
dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic
or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked
like some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of
coal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately
under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have
been painted scarlet; three black tufts, two on the upper lip and one
under the lower, seemed to touch up the face with the fierce moustaches
of Mephistopheles. His eyes had that "dancing madness" in them which
Stevenson saw in the Gaelic eyes of Alan Breck; but he sometimes
distorted the expression by screwing a monstrous monocle into one of
them. A man more unmistakable would have been hard to find. You could
have picked him out in any crowd—so long as you had not seen his
photograph.
But in this scientific picture of him twenty causes, accidental and
conventional, had combined to obliterate him altogether. The limits
of photography forbade the strong and almost melodramatic colouring
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of cheek and eyebrow. The accident of the lighting took nearly all the
darkness out of the hair and made him look almost like a fair man. The
framing and limitation of the shoulders made him look like a big man;
and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write
poetry made him look like a lazy man. Holding his head back, as people
do when they are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly never
held it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated
his slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished
by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature
has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could
have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest
water-colours, on the smoothest ivory.
I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures, one of
which depicts the unfortunate poet in question. To say it represents
an utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate
language the license of its sprawling lines. The authorities thought it
strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet's photograph. They
would have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate
Max's caricature. But the caricature would have been far more likely to
find the man.
This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific
civilisation. It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man
that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him. Thus declarations,
seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever
149
since I was a boy. We were told that in some row Boer policemen had
shot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen. A long time
afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was
quite black. Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; black
men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men. But
it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so
startling an alteration of the photograph. I am sorry we got hold of a
photographic negative in which a black man came out white. Later we were
told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag,
which would have been a disgusting thing to do. Later, it was admitted
that he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had been
a Pole. Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black
is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to
moral independence. But why does it so seldom have all the facts before
it? Why are the big aggressive features, such as blackness or the Celtic
wrath, always left out in such official communications, as they were
left out in the photograph? My friend the poet had hair as black as an
African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman; why does our civilisation
drop all four of the facts? Its error is to omit the arresting
thing—which might really arrest the criminal. It strikes first the
chilling note of science, demanding a man "above the middle height, chin
shaven, with gray moustache," etc., which might mean Mr. Balfour or Sir
Redvers Buller. It does not seize the first fact of impression, as that
a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a
nigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American.
These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other.
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They are almost always left out of the inquiry.
151
THE SULTAN
There is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial
cultures. That is, that in most human things if you spread your butter
far you spread it thin. But there is an odder fact yet: rooted in
something dark and irrational in human nature. That is, that when you
find your butter thin, you begin to spread it. And it is just when you
find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread
them among your fellow-creatures. It is a paradox; but not my paradox.
There are numerous cases in history; but I think the strongest case is
this. That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we
have Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms.
I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not arise
out of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius, it was a fad,
and like most fads an imitation. For what was wrong with Rhodes was not
that, like Cromwell or Hildebrand, he made huge mistakes, nor even that
he committed great crimes. It was that he committed these crimes and
errors in order to spread certain ideas. And when one asked for the
ideas they could not be found. Cromwell stood for Calvinism, Hildebrand
for Catholicism: but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the
world. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the
principles that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs
of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous.
That the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself must be the
fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could
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not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which
he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old
bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently
quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his
time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill
somewhere in South Africa "his church." It was not his fault, I mean,
that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at
all. It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he "figured out
that God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible."
Many evolutionists much wiser had "figured out" things even more
babyish. He was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popular
science of his time; he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk in
Streatham could not have spread for him. But it was exactly because he
had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and
ruined republics to spread them.
But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable Imperialism not
only has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has are
actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to
extend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be represented
as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that our
Imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the
East. For that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialism
has been deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology.
The same society lady who expects the Hindoos to accept her view of
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politics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants first
to steal their earth, and then to share their heaven. The same Imperial
cynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himself
submitted to Turkish philosophy, to a wholly Turkish view of despotism
and destiny.
There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life of
Rhodes. The writer admits with proper Imperial gloom the fact that
Africa is still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes in
the South confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks,
Arabs, and Soudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes:
"It is inevitable fate that all this should be changed; and I should
like to be the agent of fate." That was Cecil Rhodes's one small genuine
idea; and it is an Oriental idea.
Here we have evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present Imperial
position. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Moslem bedouins and
barbarians, in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate.
We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order to
teach a Turk to say "Kismet"; which he has said since his cradle. We
are to deny Christian justice and destroy international equality, all in
order to teach an Arab to believe he is "an agent of fate," when he has
never believed anything else. If Cecil Rhodes's vision could come true
(which fortunately is increasingly improbable), such countries as Persia
or Arabia would simply be filled with ugly and vulgar fatalists in
billycocks, instead of with graceful and dignified fatalists in turbans.
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The best Western idea, the idea of spiritual liberty and danger, of a
doubtful and romantic future in which all things may happen—this
essential Western idea Cecil Rhodes could not spread, because (as he
says himself) he did not believe in it.
It was an Oriental who gave to Queen Victoria the crown of an Empress
in addition to that of a Queen. He did not understand that the title of
King is higher than that of Emperor. For in the East titles are meant
to be vast and wild; to be extravagant poems: the Brother of the Sun and
Moon, the Caliph who lives for ever. But a King of England (at least in
the days of real kings) did not bear a merely poetical title; but rather
a religious one. He belonged to his people and not merely they to him.
He was not merely a conqueror, but a father—yes, even when he was
a bad father. But this sort of solid sanctity always goes with local
affections and limits: and the Cecil Rhodes Imperialism set up not the
King, but the Sultan; with all the typically Eastern ideas of the magic
of money, of luxury without uproar; of prostrate provinces and a chosen
race. Indeed Cecil Rhodes illustrated almost every quality essential to
the Sultan, from the love of diamonds to the scorn of woman.
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THE ARCHITECT OF SPEARS
The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion
which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic
architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained
in most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic
eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once
lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No
man ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a
cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India
there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something
tortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers
and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of
their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the
vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern.
Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens
to dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the
Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the
Gothic more interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this;
indeed, there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals
would have passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitable
grandeur of the old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaiety
that we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a
chorister suddenly began singing "Bill Bailey" in church. Yet that would
be only doing in music what the mediaevals did in sculpture. They put
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into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music hall
song: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the
hanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of
its features, it also is not the secret of its unique effect. We see
a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches. But delightful
as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling,
infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quite
different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even been
so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval
building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough,
shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after the
same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating bristles,
are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all the
same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and almost
equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in mediaevalism;
and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity, as
of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again, the uniqueness
is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the ethereal silvery
drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such as the
Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of these
explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about
Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of
furniture-vans.
I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the
smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall
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cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the
yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across
that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the
more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it
like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this
ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly
coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond
that the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that,
straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as
the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.
As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;
what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not
variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical,
but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man
of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or
an Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had
mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this
gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving
towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across
the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with
the clouds. Then I saw what it was.
The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that
it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting
architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are
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stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear
the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty
and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of
imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners
going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingled noises
of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up
its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from
all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in
the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his
wings of brass.
And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in
the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight;
the voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of
spears. I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church;
and I knew indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in
either hand the trowel and the sword.
I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had
marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.
Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of
the desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been
woke at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the
tall pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every
snake or sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner
of the architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally
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in the flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like
torches across dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of
music and darkness and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln
hill. So for some hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of
the Gothic; then the last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw
only a church tower in a quiet English town, round which the English
birds were floating.
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THE MAN ON TOP
There is a fact at the root of all realities to-day which cannot be
stated too simply. It is that the powers of this world are now not
trusted simply because they are not trustworthy. This can be quite
clearly seen and said without any reference to our several passions or
partisanships. It does not follow that we think such a distrust a wise
sentiment to express; it does not even follow that we think it a good
sentiment to entertain. But such is the sentiment, simply because such
is the fact. The distinction can be quite easily defined in an example.
I do not think that private workers owe an indefinite loyalty to their
employer. But I do think that patriotic soldiers owe a more or less
indefinite loyalty to their leader in battle. But even if they ought to
trust their captain, the fact remains that they often do not trust him;
and the fact remains that he often is not fit to be trusted.
Most of the employers and many of the Socialists seem to have got a very
muddled ethic about the basis of such loyalty; and perpetually try to
put employers and officers upon the same disciplinary plane. I should
have thought myself that the difference was alphabetical enough. It has
nothing to do with the idealising of war or the materialising of trade;
it is a distinction in the primary purpose. There might be much more
elegance and poetry in a shop under William Morris than in a regiment
under Lord Kitchener. But the difference is not in the persons or the
atmosphere, but in the aim. The British Army does not exist in order
to pay Lord Kitchener. William Morris's shop, however artistic and
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philanthropic, did exist to pay William Morris. If it did not pay the
shopkeeper it failed as a shop; but Lord Kitchener does not fail if he
is underpaid, but only if he is defeated. The object of the Army is the
safety of the nation from one particular class of perils; therefore,
since all citizens owe loyalty to the nation, all citizens who are
soldiers owe loyalty to the Army. But nobody has any obligation to make
some particular rich man richer. A man is bound, of course, to consider
the indirect results of his action in a strike; but he is bound to
consider that in a swing, or a giddy-go-round, or a smoking concert;
in his wildest holiday or his most private conversation. But direct
responsibility like that of a soldier he has none. He need not aim
solely and directly at the good of the shop; for the simple reason that
the shop is not aiming solely and directly at the good of the nation.
The shopman is, under decent restraints, let us hope, trying to get what
he can out of the nation; the shop assistant may, under the same decent
restraints, get what he can out of the shopkeeper. All this distinction
is very obvious. At least I should have thought so.
But the primary point which I mean is this. That even if we do take the
military view of mercantile service, even if we do call the rebellious
shop assistant "disloyal"—that leaves exactly where it was the
question of whether he is, in point of fact, in a good or bad shop.
Granted that all Mr. Poole's employees are bound to follow for ever the
cloven pennon of the Perfect Pair of Trousers, it is all the more true
that the pennon may, in point of fact, become imperfect. Granted that
all Barney Barnato's workers ought to have followed him to death or
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glory, it is still a Perfectly legitimate question to ask which he was
likely to lead them to. Granted that Dr. Sawyer's boy ought to die for
his master's medicines, we may still hold an inquest to find out if he
died of them. While we forbid the soldier to shoot the general, we may
still wish the general were shot.
The fundamental fact of our time is the failure of the successful man.
Somehow we have so arranged the rules of the game that the winners are
worthless for other purposes; they can secure nothing except the prize.
The very rich are neither aristocrats nor self-made men; they are
accidents—or rather calamities. All revolutionary language is
a generation behind the times in talking of their futility. A
revolutionist would say (with perfect truth) that coal-owners know next
to nothing about coal-mining. But we are past that point. Coal-owners
know next to nothing about coal-owning. They do not develop and defend
the nature of their own monopoly with any consistent and courageous
policy, however wicked, as did the old aristocrats with the monopoly of
land. They have not the virtues nor even the vices of tyrants; they have
only their powers. It is the same with all the powerful of to-day; it is
the same, for instance, with the high-placed and high-paid official. Not
only is the judge not judicial, but the arbiter is not even arbitrary.
The arbiter decides, not by some gust of justice or injustice in his
soul like the old despot dooming men under a tree, but by the permanent
climate of the class to which he happens to belong. The ancient wig of
the judge is often indistinguishable from the old wig of the flunkey.
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To judge about success or failure one must see things very simply; one
must see them in masses, as the artist, half closing his eyes against
details, sees light and shade. That is the only way in which a just
judgment can be formed as to whether any departure or development, such
as Islam or the American Republic, has been a benefit upon the whole.
Seen close, such great erections always abound in ingenious detail and
impressive solidity; it is only by seeing them afar off that one can
tell if the Tower leans.
Now if we thus take in the whole tilt or posture of our modern state,
we shall simply see this fact: that those classes who have on the whole
governed, have on the whole failed. If you go to a factory you will
see some very wonderful wheels going round; you will be told that the
employer often comes there early in the morning; that he has great
organising power; that if he works over the colossal accumulation of
wealth he also works over its wise distribution. All this may be true of
many employers, and it is practically said of all.
But if we shade our eyes from all this dazzle of detail; if we simply
ask what has been the main feature, the upshot, the final fruit of the
capitalist system, there is no doubt about the answer. The special and
solid result of the reign of the employers has been—unemployment.
Unemployment not only increasing, but becoming at last the very pivot
upon which the whole process turns.
Or, again, if you visit the villages that depend on one of the great
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squires, you will hear praises, often just, of the landlord's good sense
or good nature; you will hear of whole systems of pensions or of care
for the sick, like those of a small and separate nation; you will see
much cleanliness, order, and business habits in the offices and accounts
of the estate. But if you ask again what has been the upshot, what has
been the actual result of the reign of landlords, again the answer is
plain. At the end of the reign of landlords men will not live on the
land. The practical effect of having landlords is not having tenants.
The practical effect of having employers is that men are not employed.
The unrest of the populace is therefore more than a murmur against
tyranny; it is against a sort of treason. It is the suspicion that
even at the top of the tree, even in the seats of the mighty, our very
success is unsuccessful.
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THE OTHER KIND OF MAN
There are some who are conciliated by Conciliation Boards. There are
some who, when they hear of Royal Commissions, breathe again—or
snore again. There are those who look forward to Compulsory Arbitration
Courts as to the islands of the blest. These men do not understand the
day that they look upon or the sights that their eyes have seen.
The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few may
incarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages, and has done great things
for justice and liberty. It has had its real hours of triumph, as when
the States General met to renew France's youth like the eagle's; or
when all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure of
Washington. It is not having one of its hours of triumph now. The
real democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of the
representative process, but rather a revolt against it. It is no good
giving those now in revolt more boards and committees and compulsory
regulations. It is against these very things that they are revolting.
Men are not only rising against their oppressors, but against their
representatives or, as they would say, their misrepresentatives.
The inner and actual spirit of workaday England is coming out not in
applause, but in anger, as a god who should come out of his tabernacle
to rebuke and confound his priests.
There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whom
we do not, in general, bother very much about. He is the kind of man of
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whom his wife says that a better husband when he's sober you couldn't
have. She sometimes adds that he never is sober; but this is in anger
and exaggeration. Really he drinks much less and works much more than
the modern legend supposes. But it is quite true that he has not the
horror of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies;
and it is quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sort
of industry natural to the classes from which men can climb into great
wealth. He has grown, partly by necessity, but partly also by temper,
accustomed to have dirty clothes and dirty hands normally and without
discomfort. He regards cleanliness as a kind of separate and special
costume; to be put on for great festivals. He has several really curious
characteristics, which would attract the eyes of sociologists, if they
had any eyes. For instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, in
marked contrast to his actual spirit, which is generally patient and
civil. He has an odd way of using certain words of really horrible
meaning, but using them quite innocently and without the most distant
taint of the evils to which they allude. He is rather sentimental; and,
like most sentimental people, not devoid of snobbishness. At the
same time, he believes the ordinary manly commonplaces of freedom and
fraternity as he believes most of the decent traditions of Christian
men: he finds it very difficult to act according to them, but this
difficulty is not confined to him. He has a strong and individual sense
of humour, and not much power of corporate or militant action. He is not
a Socialist. Finally, he bears no more resemblance to a Labour Member
than he does to a City Alderman or a Die-Hard Duke. This is the Common
Labourer of England; and it is he who is on the march at last.
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See this man in your mind as you see him in the street, realise that it
is his open mind we wish to influence or his empty stomach we wish to
cure, and then consider seriously (if you can) the five men, including
two of his own alleged oppressors, who were summoned as a Royal
Commission to consider his claims when he or his sort went out on strike
upon the railways. I knew nothing against, indeed I knew nothing about,
any of the gentlemen then summoned, beyond a bare introduction to
Mr. Henderson, whom I liked, but whose identity I was in no danger of
confusing with that of a railway-porter. I do not think that any old
gentleman, however absent-minded, would be likely on arriving at Euston,
let us say, to hand his Gladstone-bag to Mr. Henderson or to attempt to
reward that politician with twopence. Of the others I can only judge
by the facts about their status as set forth in the public Press. The
Chairman, Sir David Harrell, appeared to be an ex-official distinguished
in (of all things in the world) the Irish Constabulary. I have no
earthly reason to doubt that the Chairman meant to be fair; but I am not
talking about what men mean to be, but about what they are. The police
in Ireland are practically an army of occupation; a man serving in them
or directing them is practically a soldier; and, of course, he must
do his duty as such. But it seems truly extraordinary to select as one
likely to sympathise with the democracy of England a man whose whole
business in life it has been to govern against its will the democracy
of Ireland. What should we say if Russian strikers were offered the
sympathetic arbitration of the head of the Russian Police in Finland
or Poland? And if we do not know that the whole civilised world sees
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Ireland with Poland as a typical oppressed nation, it is time we did.
The Chairman, whatever his personal virtues, must be by instinct
and habit akin to the capitalists in the dispute. Two more of the
Commissioners actually were the capitalists in the dispute. Then
came Mr. Henderson (pushing his trolley and cheerily crying, "By your
leave."), and then another less known gentleman who had "corresponded"
with the Board of Trade, and had thus gained some strange claim to
represent the very poor.
Now people like this might quite possibly produce a rational enough
report, and in this or that respect even improve things. Men of
that kind are tolerably kind, tolerably patriotic, and tolerably
business-like. But if any one supposes that men of that kind can
conceivably quiet any real 'quarrel with the Man of the Other Kind, the
man whom I first described, it is frantic. The common worker is angry
exactly because he has found out that all these boards consist of the
same well-dressed Kind of Man, whether they are called Governmental or
Capitalist. If any one hopes that he will reconcile the poor, I say, as
I said at the beginning, that such a one has not looked on the light of
day or dwelt in the land of the living.
But I do not criticise such a Commission except for one most practical
and urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first Kind of Man
of whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modern
England is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honourable, would
be offensive: his speech, though rich and figurative, would be almost
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incomprehensible. Let us grant, for the moment, that this is so. This
Kind of Man, with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives, cannot be
represented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore, the other Kind
of Man, fairly prosperous, fairly plausible, at home at least with the
middle class, capable at least of reaching and touching the upper class,
he must remain the only Kind of Man for such councils.
Very well. If then, you give at any future time any kind of compulsory
powers to such councils to prevent strikes, you will be driving the
first Kind of Man to work for a particular master as much as if you
drove him with a whip.
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THE MEDIAEVAL VILLAIN
I see that there have been more attempts at the whitewashing of King
John.
But the gentleman who wrote has a further interest in the matter; for he
believes that King John was innocent, not only on this point, but as a
whole. He thinks King John has been very badly treated; though I am not
sure whether he would attribute to that Plantagenet a saintly merit or
merely a humdrum respectability.
I sympathise with the whitewashing of King John, merely because it is
a protest against our waxwork style of history. Everybody is in a
particular attitude, with particular moral attributes; Rufus is always
hunting and Coeur-de-Lion always crusading; Henry VIII always marrying,
and Charles I always having his head cut off; Alfred rapidly and in
rotation making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes; and
King John pulling out Jews' teeth with the celerity and industry of
an American dentist. Anything is good that shakes all this stiff
simplification, and makes us remember that these men were once alive;
that is, mixed, free, flippant, and inconsistent. It gives the mind
a healthy kick to know that Alfred had fits, that Charles I prevented
enclosures, that Rufus was really interested in architecture, that Henry
VIII was really interested in theology.
And as these scraps of reality can startle us into more solid
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imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are
on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a
Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they
were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think
that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of
him is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities or not, he had
what commonly makes them possible, dare-devil courage, for instance, and
hotheaded decision. But, above all, he had a morality which he broke,
but which we misunderstand.
The mediaeval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will. In
their social system the mediaevals were too much PARTI-PER-PALE, as
their heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings
of guild or degree. But in their moral philosophy they always thought of
man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest. While
they clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stiffly
and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have
of the freedom of the soul. For them the soul always hung poised like an
eagle in the heavens of liberty. Many of the things that strike a modern
as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice.
For instance, the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minute
description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused
the apple; what kings, laws, babies, animals, planets would have been
in an unfallen world. So intensely does he feel that Adam might have
decided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision of
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another world, a world that now can never be.
This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way
can be felt through all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, and
ballad. It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy
intellectual forces. The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the
physical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may have
taught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think of
bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of
people. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism. It
brought the villain upon the stage; the lost soul; the modern version
of King John. But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that
about him, even when they detested him. They instinctively felt him to
be a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evil
passions to have much too good a time of it. They might have spoken of
him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell; but they would
have not talked of him as if he had come from there. In the ballads of
Percy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon the
scene, and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale. But we
do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is
a definite stage direction "Enter Tyrant." Nor do we behold a deus ex
machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in the
ballad is in a state of virile indecision. Sometimes he will pass from
a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness;
sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it by
a jest. Yet this august levity is not moral indifference; it is moral
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freedom. It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, being
the type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly and
sometimes well. In this sense John is certainly misrepresented, for he
is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw. In
that sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he lived
in a world where every one was piebald.
King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind
of degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's
backbone and green blood in his veins. The mediaevals were quite capable
of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable
of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortiori
case is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil.
Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman
actually in answer to prayers to Satan, and his earlier actions are
simply those of the infernal fire let loose upon earth. Yet though he
can be called almost literally a child of hell, yet the climax of the
story is his repentance at Rome and his great reparation. That is the
paradox of mediaeval morals: as it must appear to the moderns. We must
try to conceive a race of men who hated John, and sought his blood, and
believed every abomination about him, who would have been quite capable
of assassinating or torturing him in the extremity of their anger. And
yet we must admit that they would not really have been fundamentally
surprised if he had shaved his head in humiliation, given all his goods
to the poor, embraced the lepers in a lazar-house, and been canonised
as a saint in heaven. So strongly did they hold that the pivot of Will
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should turn freely, which now is rusted, and sticks.
For we, whatever our political opinions, certainly never think of our
public men like that. If we hold the opinion that Mr. Lloyd George is a
noble tribune of the populace and protector of the poor, we do not admit
that he can ever have paltered with the truth or bargained with the
powerful. If we hold the equally idiotic opinion that he is a red and
rabid Socialist, maddening mobs into mutiny and theft, then we expect
him to go on maddening them—and us. We do not expect him, let
us say, suddenly to go into a monastery. We have lost the idea of
repentance; especially in public things; that is why we cannot
really get rid of our great national abuses of economic tyranny and
aristocratic avarice. Progress in the modern sense is a very dismal
drudge; and mostly consists of being moved on by the police. We move on
because we are not allowed to move back. But the really ragged prophets,
the real revolutionists who held high language in the palaces of kings,
they did not confine themselves to saying, "Onward, Christian soldiers,"
still less, "Onward, Futurist soldiers"; what they said to high emperors
and to whole empires was, "Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?"
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THE DIVINE DETECTIVE
Every person of sound education enjoys detective stories, and there
are even several points on which they have a hearty superiority to
most modern books. A detective story generally describes six living
men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story
generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be
alive. But those who have enjoyed the roman policier must have noted
one thing, that when the murderer is caught he is hardly ever hanged.
"That," says Sherlock Holmes, "is the advantage of being a private
detective"; after he has caught he can set free. The Christian Church
can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting
that official detective—the State. This, indeed, is one of the
injustices done to historic Christianity; injustices which arise from
looking at complex exceptions and not at the large and simple fact. We
are constantly being told that theologians used racks and thumbscrews,
and so they did. Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as they
used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them.
Christianity no more created the mediaeval tortures than it did the
Chinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as the
Chinese.
The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and
employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture,
if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real
difference between the Church and the State is huge and plain. The
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State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment,
more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal
everywhere. The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to
create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever
attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to
avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the
weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the
world. Its speciality—or, if you like, its oddity—was this
merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not
slay.
I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to two popular plays
on somewhat parallel topics, which have been successful here and in
America. The Passing of the Third Floor Back is a humane and reverent
experiment, dealing with the influence of one unknown but divine figure
as he passes through a group of Squalid characters. I have no desire to
make cheap fun of the extremely abrupt conversions of all these people;
that is a point of art, not of morals; and, after all, many conversions
have been abrupt. This saviour's method of making people good is to tell
them how good they are already; and in the case of suicidal outcasts,
whose moral backs are broken, and who are soaked with sincere
self-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way.
I should not deliver this message to authors or members of Parliament,
because they would so heartily agree with it.
Still, it is not altogether here that I differ from the moral of Mr.
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Jerome's play. I differ vitally from his story because it is not a
detective story. There is in it none of this great Christian idea of
tearing their evil out of men; it lacks the realism of the saints.
Redemption should bring truth as well as peace; and truth is a fine
thing, though the materialists did go mad about it. Things must be
faced, even in order to be forgiven; the great objection to "letting
sleeping dogs lie" is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr.
Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back the redeemer is not a divine
detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather he is a
sort of divine dupe, who does not pardon at all, because he does not
see anything that is going on. It may, or may not, be true to say, "Tout
comprendre est tout pardonner." But it is much more evidently true to
say, "Rien comprendre est rien Pardonner," and the "Third Floor Back"
does not seem to comprehend anything. He might, after all, be a quite
selfish sentimentalist, who found it comforting to think well of his
neighbours. There is nothing very heroic in loving after you have been
deceived. The heroic business is to love after you have been undeceived.
When I saw this play it was natural to compare it with another play
which I had not seen, but which I have read in its printed version.
I mean Mr. Rann Kennedy's Servant in the House, the success of which
sprawls over so many of the American newspapers. This also is concerned
with a dim, yet evidently divine, figure changing the destinies of a
whole group of persons. It is a better play structurally than the other;
in fact, it is a very fine play indeed; but there is nothing
aesthetic or fastidious about it. It is as much or more than the other
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sensational, democratic, and (I use the word in a sound and good sense)
Salvationist.
But the difference lies precisely in this—that the Christ of Mr.
Kennedy's play insists on really knowing all the souls that he loves;
he declines to conquer by a kind of supernatural stupidity. He pardons
evil, but he will not ignore it. In other words, he is a Christian, and
not a Christian Scientist. The distinction doubtless is partly explained
by the problems severally selected. Mr. Jerome practically supposes
Christ to be trying to save disreputable people; and that, of course,
is naturally a simple business. Mr. Kennedy supposes Him to be trying
to save the reputable people, which is a much larger affair. The chief
characters in The Servant in the House are a popular and strenuous
vicar, universally respected, and his fashionable and forcible wife.
It would have been no good to tell these people they had some good in
them—for that was what they were telling themselves all day long.
They had to be reminded that they had some bad in them—instinctive
idolatries and silent treasons which they always tried to forget. It is
in connection with these crimes of wealth and culture that we face the
real problem of positive evil. The whole of Mr. Blatchford's controversy
about sin was vitiated throughout by one's consciousness that whenever
he wrote the word "sinner" he thought of a man in rags. But here, again,
we can find truth merely by referring to vulgar literature—its
unfailing fountain. Whoever read a detective story about poor people?
The poor have crimes; but the poor have no secrets. And it is because
the proud have secrets that they need to be detected before they are
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forgiven.
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THE ELF OF JAPAN
There are things in this world of which I can say seriously that I
love them but I do not like them. The point is not merely verbal, but
psychologically quite valid. Cats are the first things that occur to me
as examples of the principle. Cats are so beautiful that a creature from
another star might fall in love with them, and so incalculable that he
might kill them. Some of my friends take quite a high moral line about
cats. Some, like Mr. Titterton, I think, admire a cat for its moral
independence and readiness to scratch anybody "if he does not behave
himself." Others, like Mr. Belloe, regard the cat as cruel and secret, a
fit friend for witches; one who will devour everything, except, indeed,
poisoned food, "so utterly lacking is it in Christian simplicity and
humility." For my part, I have neither of these feelings. I admire cats
as I admire catkins; those little fluffy things that hang on trees. They
are both pretty and both furry, and both declare the glory of God. And
this abstract exultation in all living things is truly to be called
Love; for it is a higher feeling than mere affectional convenience; it
is a vision. It is heroic, and even saintly, in this: that it asks for
nothing in return. I love all the eats in the street as St. Francis of
Assisi loved all the birds in the wood or all the fishes in the sea; not
so much, of course, but then I am not a saint. But he did not wish to
bridle a bird and ride on its back, as one bridles and rides on a horse.
He did not wish to put a collar round a fish's neck, marked with the
name "Francis," and the address "Assisi"—as one does with a dog.
He did not wish them to belong to him or himself to belong to them;
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in fact, it would be a very awkward experience to belong to a lot of
fishes. But a man does belong to his dog, in another but an equally
real sense with that in which the dog belongs to him. The two bonds of
obedience and responsibility vary very much with the dogs and the men;
but they are both bonds. In other words, a man does not merely love a
dog; as he might (in a mystical moment) love any sparrow that perched
on his windowsill or any rabbit that ran across his path. A man likes a
dog; and that is a serious matter.
To me, unfortunately perhaps (for I speak merely of individual taste), a
cat is a wild animal. A cat is Nature personified. Like Nature, it is
so mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in its beauty. But like
Nature again, it is so beautiful that one cannot believe that it is
really cruel. Perhaps it isn't; and there again it is like Nature. Men
of old time worshipped cats as they worshipped crocodiles; and those
magnificent old mystics knew what they were about. The moment in which
one really loves cats is the same as that in which one (moderately and
within reason) loves crocodiles. It is that divine instant when a man
feels himself—no, not absorbed into the unity of all things (a
loathsome fancy)—but delighting in the difference of all things.
At the moment when a man really knows he is a man he will feel, however
faintly, a kind of fairy-tale pleasure in the fact that a crocodile is
a crocodile. All the more will he exult in the things that are more
evidently beautiful than crocodiles, such as flowers and birds and
eats—which are more beautiful than either. But it does not follow
that he will wish to pick all the flowers or to cage all the birds or to
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own all the cats.
No one who still believes in democracy and the rights of man will admit
that any division between men and men can be anything but a fanciful
analogy to the division between men and animals. But in the sphere of
such fanciful analogy there are even human beings whom I feel to be like
eats in this respect: that I can love them without liking them. I
feel it about certain quaint and alien societies, especially about the
Japanese. The exquisite old Japanese draughtsmanship (of which we shall
see no more, now Japan has gone in for Progress and Imperialism) had a
quality that was infinitely attractive and intangible. Japanese pictures
were really rather like pictures made by cats. They were full of
feathery softness and of sudden and spirited scratches. If any one will
wander in some gallery fortunate enough to have a fine collection of
those slight water-colour sketches on rice paper which come from the
remote East, he will observe many elements in them which a fanciful
person might consider feline. There is, for instance, that odd enjoyment
of the tops of trees; those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs, up
to which certainly no artist, but only a cat could climb. There is that
elvish love of the full moon, as large and lucid as a Chinese lantern,
hung in these tenuous branches. That moon is so large and luminous
that one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it. Then there is the
exhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish; subjects in which
cats are said to be interested. Then there is the slanting cat-like eye
of all these Eastern gods and men—but this is getting altogether
too coincident. We shall have another racial theory in no time
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(beginning "Are the Japs Cats?"), and though I shall not believe in
my theory, somebody else might. There are people among my esteemed
correspondents who might believe anything. It is enough for me to say
here that in this small respect Japs affect me like cats. I mean that I
love them. I love their quaint and native poetry, their instinct of easy
civilisation, their unique unreplaceable art, the testimony they bear
to the bustling, irrepressible activities of nature and man. If I were
a real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain, I am sure I
should love them more even than the strong winged and unwearied birds
or the fruitful, ever multiplying fish. But, as for liking them, as one
likes a dog—that is quite another matter. That would mean trusting
them.
In the old English and Scotch ballads the fairies are regarded very much
in the way that I feel inclined to regard Japs and cats. They are not
specially spoken of as evil; they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful;
but they are not trusted as good. You do not say the wrong words or give
the wrong gifts to them; and there is a curious silence about what would
happen to you if you did. Now to me, Japan, the Japan of Art, was always
a fairyland. What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white as
wedding cakes; what lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail as
lanterns!… but... but... the missionary explained (I read in the
paper) that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torture
was a mere matter of verbal translation. "The Japanese would not call
twisting the thumbs back 'torture.'"
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THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE
I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lynd for his most just remark
in connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becoming
a peril to society. I have no attraction to that sort of atheist
asceticism to which the purer types of Anarchism tend; but both an
atheist and an ascetic are better men than a spy; and it is ignominious
to see one's country thus losing her special point of honour about
asylum and liberty. It will be quite a new departure if we begin to
protect and whitewash foreign policemen. I always understood it was
only English policemen who were absolutely spotless. A good many of us,
however, have begun to feel with Mr. Lynd, and on all sides authorities
and officials are being questioned. But there is one most graphic and
extraordinary fact, which it did not lie in Mr. Lynd's way to touch
upon, but which somebody really must seize and emphasise. It is
this: that at the very time when we are all beginning to doubt these
authorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capricious
powers. All our commissions, petitions, and letters to the papers
are asking whether these authorities can give an account of their
stewardship. And at the same moment all our laws are decreeing that they
shall not give any account of their stewardship, but shall become yet
more irresponsible stewards. Bills like the Feeble-Minded Bill and
the Inebriate Bill (very appropriate names for them) actually arm with
scorpions the hand that has chastised the Malatestas and Maleckas with
whips. The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paid
person who writes certificates and "passes" this, that, or the other;
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this sort of man is being trusted with more authority, apparently
because he is being doubted with more reason. In one room we are asking
why the Government and the great experts between them cannot sail a
ship. In another room we are deciding that the Government and experts
shall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one's body,
damn any one's soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levity
of a pagan god. We are putting the official on the throne while he is
still in the dock.
The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified; as
when people talk of an author's "message," without thinking whom it
is from; and I have noted in these connections the strange misuse of
another word. It is the excellent mediaeval word "charter." I remember
the Act that sought to save gutter-boys from cigarettes was called
"The Children's Charter." Similarly the Act which seeks to lock up as
lunatics people who are not lunatics was actually called a "charter" of
the feeble-minded. Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if the
Bills are right. Even were they right in theory they would be applied
only to the poor, like many better rules about education and cruelty.
A woman was lately punished for cruelty because her children were not
washed when it was proved that she had no water. From that it will be an
easy step in Advanced Thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing when
it is proved that he had no wine. Rifts in right reason widen down the
ages. And when we have begun by shutting up a confessedly kind
person for cruelty, we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann for
feeblemindedness.
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But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to use
the word "charter." A charter does not mean a thing that does good to
people. It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties.
It may be a good thing for gutter-boys to be deprived of their
cigarettes: it might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived of
their cigars. But I think the Goldsmiths' Company would be very much
surprised if the King granted them a new charter (in place of their
mediaeval charter), and it only meant that policemen might pull the
cigars out of their mouths. It may be a good thing that all drunkards
should be locked up: and many acute statesmen (King John, for instance)
would certainly have thought it a good thing if all aristocrats could
be locked up. But even that somewhat cynical prince would scarcely have
granted to the barons a thing called "the Great Charter" and then locked
them all up on the strength of it. If he had, this interpretation of the
word "charter" would have struck the barons with considerable surprise.
I doubt if their narrow mediaeval minds could have taken it in.
The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no
Englishman will ever understand his own language (or even his own
conscience) till he understands them. And he will never understand them
till he understands this word "charter." I will attempt in a moment
to state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was. In modern,
practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter
was. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last
Christmas and did not get; and apparently will never get. It is called
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in the current jargon "recognition"; the acknowledgment in so many words
by society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. If
there had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably have
been a railwaymen's guild; and it would have had a charter from the
King, defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an idea
still true and then almost universal: that authority is necessary
for nothing so much as for the granting of liberties. Like everything
mediaeval, it ramified back to a root in religion; and was a sort of
small copy of the Christian idea of man's creation. Man was free, not
because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free.
By authority he was free. By authority the craftsmen of the guilds were
free. Many other great philosophers took and take the other view:
the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and
determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave
man a law. The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.
Modern feeling may not sympathise with its list of liberties, which
included the liberty to be damned; but that has nothing to do with the
fact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws. This was mirrored,
however dimly, in the whole system. There was a great deal of gross
inequality; and in other aspects absolute equality was taken
for granted. But the point is that equality and inequality were
ranks—or rights. There were not only things one was forbidden
to do; but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not only
definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays of
his soul were immovable feasts. All a charter really meant lingers alive
in that poetic phrase that calls the wind a "chartered" libertine.
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Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at every
man's door and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takes
liberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feel
that the wind is always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker.
But remember that in the days when free men had charters, they held that
the wind itself was wild by authority; and was only free because it had
a father.
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THE CONTENTED MAN
The word content is not inspiring nowadays; rather it is irritating
because it is dull. It prepares the mind for a little sermon in the
style of the Vicar of Wakefield about how you and I should be satisfied
with our countrified innocence and our simple village sports. The word,
however, has two meanings, somewhat singularly connected; the "sweet
content" of the poet and the "cubic content" of the mathematician. Some
distinguish these by stressing the different syllables. Thus, it might
happen to any of us, at some social juncture, to remark gaily, "Of the
content of the King of the Cannibal Islands' Stewpot I am content to be
ignorant"; or "Not content with measuring the cubic content of my safe,
you are stealing the spoons." And there really is an analogy between the
mathematical and the moral use of the term, for lack of the observation
of which the latter has been much weakened and misused.
The preaching of contentment is in disrepute, well deserved in so far
that the moral is really quite inapplicable to the anarchy and insane
peril of our tall and toppling cities. Content suggests some kind of
security; and it is not strange that our workers should often think
about rising above their position, since they have so continually to
think about sinking below it. The philanthropist who urges the poor to
saving and simple pleasures deserves all the derision that he gets. To
advise people to be content with what they have got may or may not be
sound moral philosophy.
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But to urge people to be content with what they haven't got is a piece
of impudence hard for even the English poor to pardon. But though the
creed of content is unsuited to certain special riddles and wrongs,
it remains true for the normal of mortal life. We speak of divine
discontent; discontent may sometimes be a divine thing, but content must
always be the human thing. It may be true that a particular man, in his
relation to his master or his neighbour, to his country or his enemies,
will do well to be fiercely unsatisfied or thirsting for an angry
justice. But it is not true, no sane person can call it true, that man
as a whole in his general attitude towards the world, in his posture
towards death or green fields, towards the weather or the baby, will be
wise to cultivate dissatisfaction. In a broad estimate of our earthly
experience, the great truism on the tablet remains: he must not covet
his neighbour's ox nor his ass nor anything that is his. In highly
complex and scientific civilisations he may sometimes find himself
forced into an exceptional vigilance. But, then, in highly complex and
scientific civilisations, nine times out of ten, he only wants his own
ass back.
But I wish to urge the case for cubic content; in which (even more than
in moral content) I take a personal interest. Now, moral content has
been undervalued and neglected because of its separation from the other
meaning. It has become a negative rather than a positive thing. In some
accounts of contentment it seems to be little more than a meek despair.
But this is not the true meaning of the term; it should stand for the
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idea of a positive and thorough appreciation of the content of anything;
for feeling the substance and not merely the surface of experience.
"Content" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased;
placidly, perhaps, but still positively pleased. Being contented with
bread and cheese ought not to mean not caring what you eat. It ought
to mean caring for bread and cheese; handling and enjoying the cubic
content of the bread and cheese and adding it to your own. Being
content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and
resigned to living in it. It ought to mean appreciating what there is
to appreciate in such a position; such as the quaint and elvish slope of
the ceiling or the sublime aerial view of the opposite chimney-pots. And
in this sense contentment is a real and even an active virtue; it is not
only affirmative, but creative. The poet in the attic does not forget
the attic in poetic musings; he remembers whatever the attic has of
poetry; he realises how high, how starry, how cool, how unadorned and
simple—in short, how Attic is the attic.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of
getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and
it is rare. The absence of this digestive talent is what makes so
cold and incredible the tales of so many people who say they have been
"through" things; when it is evident that they have come out on the
other side quite unchanged. A man might have gone "through" a plum
pudding as a bullet might go through a plum pudding; it depends on the
size of the pudding—and the man. But the awful and sacred question
is "Has the pudding been through him?" Has he tasted, appreciated, and
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absorbed the solid pudding, with its three dimensions and its three
thousand tastes and smells? Can he offer himself to the eyes of men as
one who has cubically conquered and contained a pudding?
In the same way we may ask of those who profess to have passed through
trivial or tragic experiences whether they have absorbed the content
of them; whether they licked up such living water as there was. It is a
pertinent question in connection with many modern problems.
Thus the young genius says, "I have lived in my dreary and squalid
village before I found success in Paris or Vienna." The sound
philosopher will answer, "You have never lived in your village, or you
would not call it dreary and squalid."
Thus the Imperialist, the Colonial idealist (who commonly speaks and
always thinks with a Yankee accent) will say, "I've been right away from
these little muddy islands, and seen God's great seas and prairies." The
sound philosopher will reply, "You have never been in these islands; you
have never seen the weald of Sussex or the plain of Salisbury; otherwise
you could never have called them either muddy or little."
Thus the Suffragette will say, "I have passed through the paltry duties
of pots and pans, the drudgery of the vulgar kitchen; but I have come
out to intellectual liberty." The sound philosopher will answer, "You
have never passed through the kitchen, or you never would call it
vulgar. Wiser and stronger women than you have really seen a poetry
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in pots and pans; naturally, because there is a poetry in them." It is
right for the village violinist to climb into fame in Paris or Vienna;
it is right for the stray Englishman to climb across the high shoulder
of the world; it is right for the woman to climb into whatever cathedrae
or high places she can allow to her sexual dignity. But it is wrong that
any of these climbers should kick the ladder by which they have climbed.
But indeed these bitter people who record their experiences really
record their lack of experiences. It is the countryman who has not
succeeded in being a countryman who comes up to London. It is the
clerk who has not succeeded in being a clerk who tries (on vegetarian
principles) to be a countryman. And the woman with a past is generally a
woman angry about the past she never had.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and
love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really
been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them
back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because
we have drunk them dry.
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THE ANGRY AUTHOR: HIS FAREWELL
I have republished all these old articles of mine because they cover
a very controversial period, in which I was in nearly all the
controversies, whether I was visible there or no. And I wish to gather
up into this last article a valedictory violence about all such things;
and then pass to where, beyond these voices, there is peace—or in
other words, to the writing of Penny Dreadfuls; a noble and much-needed
work. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism for
the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last
roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly
irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like
the Ten Commandments. I would call it "Don'ts for Dogmatists; or Things
I am Tired Of."
This book of intellectual etiquette, like most books of etiquette, would
begin with superficial things; but there would be, I fancy, a wailing
imprecation in the words that could not be called artificial; it might
begin thus:—
(1) Don't use a noun and then an adjective that crosses out the noun.
An adjective qualifies, it cannot contradict. Don't say, "Give me a
patriotism that is free from all boundaries." It is like saying, "Give
me a pork pie with no pork in it." Don't say, "I look forward to that
larger religion that shall have no special dogmas." It is like saying,
"I look forward to that larger quadruped who shall have no feet." A
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quadruped means something with four feet; and a religion means something
that commits a man to some doctrine about the universe. Don't let
the meek substantive be absolutely murdered by the joyful, exuberant
adjective.
(2) Don't say you are not going to say a thing, and then say it. This
practice is very flourishing and successful with public speakers. The
trick consists of first repudiating a certain view in unfavourable
terms, and then repeating the same view in favourable terms. Perhaps the
simplest form of it may be found in a landlord of my neighbourhood, who
said to his tenants in an election speech, "Of course I'm not going to
threaten you, but if this Budget passes the rents will go up." The thing
can be done in many forms besides this. "I am the last man to
mention party politics; but when I see the Empire rent in pieces by
irresponsible Radicals," etc. "In this hall we welcome all creeds. We
have no hostility against any honest belief; but only against that black
priestcraft and superstition which can accept such a doctrine as," etc.
"I would not say one word that could ruffle our relations with Germany.
But this I will say; that when I see ceaseless and unscrupulous
armament," etc. Please don't do it. Decide to make a remark or not to
make a remark. But don't fancy that you have somehow softened the saying
of a thing by having just promised not to say it.
(3) Don't use secondary words as primary words. "Happiness" (let us say)
is a primary word. You know when you have the thing, and you jolly well
know when you haven't. "Progress" is a secondary word; it means the
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degree of one's approach to happiness, or to some such solid ideal. But
modern controversies constantly turn on asking, "Does Happiness help
Progress?" Thus, I see in the New Age this week a letter from Mr.
Egerton Swann, in which he warns the world against me and my friend Mr.
Belloc, on the ground that our democracy is "spasmodic" (whatever that
means); while our "reactionism is settled and permanent." It never
strikes Mr. Swann that democracy means something in itself; while
"reactionism" means nothing—except in connection with democracy.
You cannot react except from something. If Mr. Swann thinks I have ever
reacted from the doctrine that the people should rule, I wish he would
give me the reference.
(4) Don't say, "There is no true creed; for each creed believes itself
right and the others wrong." Probably one of the creeds is right and
the others are wrong. Diversity does show that most of the views must
be wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show that they all must be
wrong. I suppose there is no subject on which opinions differ with more
desperate sincerity than about which horse will win the Derby. These are
certainly solemn convictions; men risk ruin for them. The man who puts
his shirt on Potosi must believe in that animal, and each of the other
men putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe in
them quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them are
wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one of
the horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might stand
for Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy.
Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has been
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known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in
first. That there were many beliefs does not destroy the fact that there
was one well-founded belief. I believe (merely upon authority) that the
world is round. That there may be tribes who believe it to be triangular
or oblong does not alter the fact that it is certainly some shape, and
therefore not any other shape. Therefore I repeat, with the wail of
imprecation, don't say that the variety of creeds prevents you from
accepting any creed. It is an unintelligent remark.
(5) Don't (if any one calls your doctrine mad, which is likely enough),
don't answer that madmen are only the minority and the sane only the
majority. The sane are sane because they are the corporate substance of
mankind; the insane are not a minority because they are not a mob. The
man who thinks himself a man thinks the next man a man; he reckons his
neighbour as himself. But the man who thinks he is a chicken does not
try to look through the man who thinks he is glass. The man who thinks
himself Jesus Christ does not quarrel with the man who thinks himself
Rockefeller; as would certainly happen if the two had ever met. But
madmen never meet. It is the only thing they cannot do. They can talk,
they can inspire, they can fight, they can found religions; but they
cannot meet. Maniacs can never be the majority; for the simple reason
that they can never be even a minority. If two madmen had ever agreed
they might have conquered the world.
(6) Don't say that the idea of human equality is absurd, because some
men are tall and some short, some clever and some stupid. At the height
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of the French Revolution it was noticed that Danton was tall and Murat
short. In the wildest popular excitement of America it is known that
Rockefeller is stupid and that Bryan is clever. The doctrine of human
equality reposes upon this: That there is no man really clever who has
not found that he is stupid. That there is no big man who has not felt
small. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are.
(7) Don't say (O don't say) that Primitive Man knocked down a woman
with a club and carried her away. Why on earth should he? Does the male
sparrow knock down the female sparrow with a twig? Does the male giraffe
knock down the female giraffe with a palm tree? Why should the male
have had to use any violence at any time in order to make the female a
female? Why should the woman roll herself in the mire lower than the
sow or the she-bear; and profess to have been a slave where all these
creatures were creators; where all these beasts were gods? Do not
talk such bosh. I implore you, I supplicate you not to talk such bosh.
Utterly and absolutely abolish all such bosh—and we may yet
begin to discuss these public questions properly. But I fear my list of
protests grows too long; and I know it could grow longer for ever. The
reader must forgive my elongations and elaborations. I fancied for the
moment that I was writing a book.